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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Chap. Copyright No*. 

Shell. ____. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



FMEPS p FOES OF YOUTH- 



BY 

REV. CHARLES WOOD, D. D. 



PHILADELPHIA : 

RICE & HIRST, Agents, Publishers, 

i i 22 Chestnut Street. 







13389 



£.,: 



1898. 



Copyright, 1898, by The American Sunday-School Union 




TVv/i> 



** Copy received 



CONTENTS. 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. Does a young man need a religion ? . . . . 5 

II. Certainties in religion 15 

III. The reasonableness of faith 29 

IV. The bible and modern thought 40 

V. Christianity and other religions 51 

VI. Conscience 63 

VII. Duty 77 

VIII. Self-indulgence 90 

IX. Amusements 104 

X. Recreation 118 

(3) 



FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 



CHAPTER I. 

DOES A YOUNG MAN NEED A RELIGION ? 

" Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way ? by 
taking heed thereto according to thy word." — Psalm 119: 9. 

THERE are very many other questions that 
are much more interesting to the young 
men of our time than this about moral cleanli- 
ness. Sometimes Ave half imagine that our 
young men are even less concerned over ethical 
and moral problems than their fathers were. 
Many a young man has a feeling of irritation 
when he considers his soul. It is a useless pos- 
session, so he fancies, and one that at any time 
may cause him very disagreeable sensations, 
and may even be the subject of fatal diseases 
real or imaginary. The best treatment for the 
spiritual nature, whose existence it is difficult 
to deny, according to his opinion, would be the 
persistent cold shoulder, so that at last the 

5 



6 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

soul itself might sink away into well-deserved 
forgetfulness. 

One would not need to go veiy far in the 
world, and not even very far in the church, to 
find a young man who has been so secularized 
by business* or by pleasure, or by a combina- 
tion of both, that for him life consists simply 
of two concepts : first, Work — disagreeable, 
necessary ; second, Play, in order for which 
he works. The third concept, Worship, is for 
him an absolute nonentity. This is the sad 
and the saddening side of the picture of our 
religious life, which causes so much distress to 
those who are very eager for the continued, 
and for the increased prosperity of our native 
land, and of humanity. 

But there is another side that is just as dif- 
ferent from this as a day in May is from a day 
in March. "They who are chanting the 
requiem of religion in mockery, or in fear, are 
alike premature,'' says one of the keenest crit- 
ics of our time. " There is nothing that is so 
vital as this very religion over whose demise 
the mourners go about the streets." The best 
books that have appeared in the last decade 
almost make you believe, as you read them, 
that the age of faith has returned, and that 
once again it shall be as we imagine it was a 
thousand or more years ago — though the facts 



NEED A EELIGION? 1 

are against us — that all men will be religious. 
The greatest philosophical work published in 
Germany in the last twenty years by a master 
to whom all our more intelligent young men 
of a philosophical temperament are eagerly 
and gratefully acknowledging their debt, is 
the colossal book, called " Mikrokosmus " by 
Lotze. The theme of this book, running 
through some eight hundred pages, is " The liv- 
ing love that wills the blessedness of others." 

When Herbert Spencer was in this country 
some years ago, he said that the best exponent 
of his philosophy was Professor John Fiske of 
Harvard. Since then Professor Fiske has 
written two books — " The Idea of God," and 
" The Destiny of Man." In the latter, very 
near the close — he has been rising on the 
heights of cosmic philosophy and evolution — 
he comes to a point where he confidently as- 
serts, " We look forward to a time when the 
kingdoms of this earth shall become the king- 
dom of Christ, and when he shall rule forever 
and ever, King of kings, and Lord of lords." 

Within the last five years at least three no- 
table books have been sent out from Harvard 
University ; two of them by Professor Koyce, 
"The Spirit of Modern Philosophy" and " The 
Eeligious Aspect of Philosophy." These 
books are filled with God — sometimes spoken 



8 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

of as Thought — the Eternal Thought — but 
you are always in His Presence as you read. 
The third book, still greater, in its way, is by 
Professor James, " The Will to Believe " ; and 
if I were going to distribute tracts somewhat 
promiscuously among educated young men, I 
do not know where I could find better material 
for them than out of these essays of Professor 
James. 

The poets of the Yictorian era are prophets, 
and it is one of the glories of that era. Ten- 
nyson's sweetest songs are of God. He begins 
his great poem, " In Memoriam," with an in- 
vocation to the " Strong Son of God immortal 
Love." He went out of life with the prayer 
on his lips, " May I see my Pilot face to face, 
when I have crossed the bar." They tell the 
story of Browning, that once in Hyde Park, 
he heard a socialistic atheist making an ad- 
dress ; after he had finished the poet jumped up 
on the chair -used by the orator, and preached 
a mighty sermon on the truth as it is in Jesus. 
Whether that is so or not I do not know, but 
I know that Browning from the beginning to 
the end of his poems has preached sermons to 
a tremendous audience that no ecclesiastic 
could ever have reached. A popular physician 
of London, a man of high culture, who had 
been drifting into the fog of agnosticism, tells 



NEED A RELIGION? 9 

his own story of how he began to see the 
headlands loom up and then at last felt the 
solid ground beneath his feet, as he listened to 
Browning's message to his time and saw how 
he rebuilt the foundations of the Christian 
faith. 

" I say the acknowledgment of God in Christ 
accepted by the reason solves for thee all 
questions in the earth and out of it." This 
too is the message of our own poets — Long- 
fellow, and Whittier, and Lowell. The pop- 
ular romances of the day — I do not mean that 
indescribable and detestable literature which 
none of us ought ever to touch — but the ro- 
mances that have already lived for months 
and will live perhaps for years are stories for 
the most part of the development of early 
Christianity or of some of its modern phases, 
— possibly the conflict of faith and skepticism 
veiled under a tale of human love. 

This then is one great trend of our modern 
culture, and it is all toward faith, toward the 
religion of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

There is a very motley crowd that has begun 
to arrive, and will continue to arrive, by a very 
different road at exactly the same point. It 
may safely be said of France, at least since the 
surrender at Sedan, that she has been the 
theatre of all wild theories in art, in govern- 



10 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

merit, and in religion. In art she has been at 
one moment "Realist, then Impressionist, and 
just at the present moment Symbolist. In 
government she has been Anarchist, Legiti- 
mist, Boulangerist, and yet all the time half 
Republican. In religion she has been Atheis- 
tic and Ultramontane. She has by turns given 
herself over to ethical culture and to Satan 
worship. But France, the literary France, 
the cultured France of to-day is far more seri- 
ous and sedate than at any time during the 
last twenty-five years, and perhaps than at any 
time during the last fifty years. Felix Brune- 
tiere, among the finest of literary critics, has 
said, " Duty is nothing if not sublime, and life 
becomes a frivolous affair without eternal rela- 
tions." He represents a significant school of 
thought in France. Professor Lanson said, 
"A breath of evangelical charity has passed 
over us like a warm south wind from the 
foot-hills of heaven, and has shaken our 
naturalism to its foundations." When France 
was worshipping, or trying to worship Bou- 
langer, Dumas said, " When will France cease 
looking for the man f What France needs is 
a God." Paul Bourget, after having tasted of 
all the sweet mixtures of the boulevards, has 
come to see — and he is honest enough to tell 
us so in his books — that there is something 



NEED A RELIGION? 11 

sweeter than Epicurean delights — it is doing 
the will of God. 

It is sometimes said that the individual 
passes ordinarily through about the same 
phases as the race itself. Just as we know 
the race is coming out step by step from the 
deepest darkness to the fullest light — so it is 
with the individual. The first phase is credu- 
lity, and that is followed by doubt, and that in 
turn, when the development is normal, by 
reasoned faith. " In completed man, begins 
anew a tendency to God." 

~No age had been wiser perhaps in its treat- 
ment of this tendency than the present one. 
Yery much less is demanded now in the be- 
ginning. If a young man wishes to be reli- 
gious, we do not hand him the Confession of 
Faith, or the Thirty-nine Articles, as our grand- 
fathers probably would have done. "We do 
not even give him the Shorter Catechism, or a 
theological book of any sort. "We say to him 
first, " Are you willing to see that there is 
mystery in life ; that it is not all summed up 
in your shop, or your club, or your golf, or 
your billiards, or your wax floor, or your 
champagne ? Are you willing to believe that 
possibly there are other things actually as im- 
portant as these things ? " The case may be 
hopeless when the answer is "No." But an 



12 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

affirmative is enough to awaken pleasant an- 
ticipations. We may go further then and ask, 
" Are you ready to receive light on these other 
things that may possibly be duties ? " There is 
where the ways of life diverge — all the future 
is dependent upon a man's willingness to re- 
ceive light. " There is not very much differ- 
ence between one man and another," a hard- 
headed, intelligent carpenter said to a philo- 
sophical professor the other day, " but what 
little there is, is very important ; and the little 
there is arises in no small degree from the at- 
titude the man takes toward light — whether 
he is shutting the windows of his soul, or 
whether he is ready to say ' I welcome it all — 
all truth can come to me from all possible di- 
rections.'" He must make choice of light, 
and he must follow it to the end. " It sounds 
almost loathsome to some of our young men," 
Professor James says, " that they are asked to 
be strenuous in their pursuit of light." Only 
as a man is willing to wrestle, only as he is 
willing to put forth every effort for the truth, 
is there any hope that he will come to the con- 
viction that this is a moral universe, and that 
God reigns, and that truth and righteousness 
shall at last triumph. You have no concep- 
tion, it may be, of the struggle that Professor 
Fiske of Harvard went through before he was 



NEED A RELIGION? 13 

able to pen those closing sentences that I have 
repeated to you this evening from " The Des- 
tiny of Man." They sound like the Halleluiah 
Chorus. The struggle to which you are called 
will scarcely be more severe. 

It is to be expected that the larger number 
of men who should be willing to put forth 
such an effort and consent to call themselves 
to strenuousness should be found among our 
most highly educated classes. As a matter of 
fact twice as many college graduates as those 
untrained in the universities have confessed 
their need of a religion and have entered into 
the communion and fellowship of the Chris- 
tian Church. That would seem to prove that 
the more education a man has, as a general 
rule, the more he feels the need of God, the 
more ready he is to look without fear into the 
faces of those who may taunt him with super- 
stition and with credulity. He knows what 
superstition and credulity are. The more fa- 
miliar he is with the facts of history, its theo- 
ries, its systems, its failures, the more prepared 
he is, as he looks into the past to lift his eyes 
to that one Figure that has concentrated upon 
itself the vision and the attention of all hu- 
manity. The man who knoAvs even superfi- 
cially what has been going on in this world 
for the last four thousand years, knows that 



li FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

nowhere else is there any power offered, with. 
uplift in it; that nowhere else is there any 
strength offered with so much of grip in it 
that evil desire and base appetite may be grap- 
pled and conquered ; that nowhere else is there 
such sympathy and such appreciation. For 
the elevation of life, for the development of 
manhood, for the control of self, for hope that 
shall come when the darkness draws on apace 
and youth has faded and pleasures have palled, 
there is but one point of light in all the dark 
heavens, and it is the light that falls from the 
face of Jesus the Christ. 

We are shut up by our reason, and by our 
experience, to a narrow choice. There is no 
other Saviour for the soul of man than he 
who died upon the cross. For the young man 
who is honest, who is true to his convictions, 
there must come a time when he will make 
his own the triumphant assertion of the old 
pagan : 

"If Jesus Christ is a man 
And only a man — I say, 
That of all mankind I cleave to him, 
And to him will I cleave ahvay. 

"If Jesus Christ is a God 

And the only God — I swear, 
I will follow him through heaven and hell, 
The earth, and the sea, and the air." 



CHAPTER II. 

CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. 

"One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I 
see."— John 9: 25. 

A CROWD of trained dialecticians on the 
one hand and a beggar on the other, 
who had never even seen better days, but 
had been blind from his birth, make sides so 
unequally matched that any intellectual con- 
test between them must, we should think, 
soon be over. This struggle, to which John 
devotes a chapter, and in which he evidently 
took a personal and sympathetic interest, was, 
in fact, a short one ; but it is the beggar who 
remains the victor on the field from which 
the logicians have been ignominiously driven. 
Yet after all, so long as physical force was 
not used, the advantage Avas with the beggar ; 
for he had a solid foothold on a practical con- 
viction, an experimental fact, and his oppo- 
nent's feet were planted in the yielding mire 
of speculative doubt. 

If the Pharisee, ancient or modern, full of 
arrogance and bigotry, with a petrified heart, 
were the only one to find his feet so slipping in 

15 



16 FRIENDS AND FOES OE YOUTH. 

the ooze that the very heavens appear to he 
reeling above him, the subject "would call for no 
other comment than a sentence or two about 
the fitness of things. But standing by the 
Pharisees' side there are many who are not 
Pharisees at all. They have no prejudices 
against truth ; they are prepossessed in its favor ; 
yfct they are compelled in candor to say that 
they cannot find any solid ground, that every- 
thing is uncertain, that they do not know what 
they believe, if they believe anything at all. 
This makes the subject much more serious and 
complicated. 

The best account that not a few of our 
friends can give of themselves is quite as un- 
favorable as the somewhat sombre, imaginary 
sketch I have just drawn. " We do not know 
where we stand," they say, " we do not know 
whether you will find us standing at all to- 
morrow or the day after." It is this condi- 
tion of things that gives such attractiveness 
and fascination to the stoutly asserted infalli- 
bility of Borne on the one hand and of the ma- 
terialistic sciences on the other. The streams 
that flow in these opposite directions have their 
source in the same fountain of religious unrest ; 
and just as a breath of air may cause the fa- 
mous raindrop in a cloud over the Rocky Moun- 
tains to find its wav into the Atlantic or the 



CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. 17 

Pacific, so may a word or a feeling too vague 
to be made articulate be potent enough to 
decide for the soul to which one of the two 
streams of credulity or skepticism it shall com- 
mit itself. 

But there is still another choice. Instead of 
yielding ourselves to a church with its spirit- 
ual soporifics, or to a science with its superior 
sneers at everything that is not material, we 
may sit at this beggar's feet ; for he seems to 
know something as certainly as either of these 
infallibles who claim to have the monopoly of 
all knowledge. His creed is short, but there 
can be no doubt of its sincerit}^ and not much, 
if we really understand it, of its efficiency. 
Such a creed as his is possible for the most 
skeptical, not in some distant time or world, 
but at once, if they are willing to do as much 
for it as the blind man was. You cannot go, 
very likely, into the evidence, that is offered in 
such overwhelming abundance for and against 
every religious truth, yes, for and against the 
very necessity and possibility of any religion 
and of any truth at all. You are modest 
enough to say that you haven't the training 
properly to weigh such evidence, even when it 
is brought before you. You feel about it very 
much as you do about some complex question 
in political economy, tariffs and taxes and com- 



18 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

munistic theories for the division of land ; and 
experts themselves, theologians or statesmen, 
if they were as modest as you, would make a 
somewhat similar confession, for there are at 
least two or three subjects so large that when 
we attempt to comprehend them they only slip 
further away from us, " like a big ball when a 
small hand tries to grasp it." 

The outlook for us all would be dark indeed 
if we must become experts before becom- 
ing Christians, as we must before becoming 
theologians or scientists. Such a condition 
would at once place Christianity among the re- 
ligions instituted by men for the comfort and 
satisfaction of a select few ; it would be its 
own evidence that it never could have come 
from the God who makes the sun shine upon 
every creature alike, and who to be even as 
good as we are, must love all his children, 
though some of them may not be very bright. 
It at once impresses us favorably when we 
hear a man with whom intellectually we might 
any of us without pride measure ourselves, as- 
sert that he has come to a belief in something 
that is as certain to him as his own existence, 
for it was a part of it, and that was why it 
was so certain. Here, in spite of the Roman- 
ist, who must get his certainties from the pris- 
oner of the Vatican, and in spite of the ma- 



CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. 19 

terialistic scientist who must get his certain- 
ties from some instrument with a Greek name, 
is the only ground of certitude of which we 
can always and everywhere be sure. 

Our own consciousness, the recognition of 
ourselves as living, thinking, acting, lies at the 
base of all knowledge. That is the primal 
certainty. There is nothing you know or can 
know so assuredly as that. They ask you in 
Germany for a certificate of birth, and if you 
cannot give it, the official looks upon you with 
a suspiciously offended air as if he had grave 
doubts about your ever having been born, or 
whether you are really alive ; but if you could 
have a certificate of birth and attestation of 
your existence from every doctor in Christen- 
dom, it would not add an atom's weight to 
your conviction on that subject. The things 
that happen to us are the realest of all real 
things. There is room for doubt about any 
so-called fact you read in history, or in the 
newspaper, or hear even from the most reliable 
sources. There is room for doubt about even 
the things you see or think you do. You bow 
to a friend across the street, and learn on the 
next square that your friend is a thousand 
miles away, and your bow was given to a 
stranger, but you cannot be mistaken about 
the fact recorded indelibly -in your soul that 



20 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

you thought you saw your friend. Eyes and 
ears deceive us every day, but the soul never. 
Its reports can be relied upon : you know that 
you are glad or sorrowful, hopeful or despond- 
ent now, with a certainty greater than that 
with which you know you are here, for if you 
should get to sleep and lose consciousness, you 
would need first to come back to consciousness 
before you would know where you were. To 
know one's self as knowing is the very first 
essential for knowing anything. 

Approach Christian truth believing just that, 
and only that, if }^ou choose, " what happens 
to me is real as nothing else is." That was all 
the creed, probably, that the blind man had be- 
fore Christ spoke to him, but it was the germ 
of a much larger creed. Begin if you like with 
the Christian truth about God that he is the 
element in which we live, that our life comes 
from him in some unexplained way as light 
comes from the dazzling fountain of it in the 
sky. Don't try to get aLGod with the intel- 
lect, — he is too far away to be reached by so 
short a ladder, — but try to get at him with the 
heart, for he is not far from every one of us. 
" The word is nigh thee even in thy mouth, 
and in thy heart." Open your soul to him 
and see if you cannot understand what Words- 
worth means when he says : 



CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. 21 

"I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime, 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, 
A motion and a spirit that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought 
And rolls through all things." 

We have lost much in time and peace and 
strength in looking for God in the sky and in 
the earth and everywhere but in our own 
hearts, where we might at once have found 
him. Like Bunyan's Christian in Doubting 
Castle, we have passed days and nights in 
gloom and despair, when all the while we had^ 
within our breasts the key that would have 
opened the prison doors for us and let us out 
into the light. "What happens to us is real." 
Listen then to the conflict in your own soul 
when you no longer try to keep God out. 
Hear strange voices there disputing and bat- 
tling with the old familiar voices of selfish- 
ness and unhallowed desire, and you will find 
yourself believing in God because you have 
felt him, and believing with a kind of certainty 
that could never come from evidence offered 
to the intellect. 

Now approach the great book of Christian- 
ity, the Bible, in the same temper. Don't 



22 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

begin by reading arguments for or against 
it. They will very probably leave you just 
about where they found you. Neither will it 
be best for you to begin with the Old Testa- 
ment, except the Psalms, or with the miracles 
of the New Testament ; it will be much better 
to begin with the parables and the sermon on 
the Mount. You are certain of what happens 
to you ! see if something will not happen to 
you as you read, not in a dull and listless way 
as you may have read the whole Bible through 
already, but as you would read a document that 
has in it just the information you think you need 
about one particular subject in which you take 
the greatest interest. See if you will not soon 
be able to understand what Coleridge meant 
when he said: "In the Bible there is more 
that finds me than I have ever experienced in 
all other books put together ; the words of the 
Bible find me at a greater depth of my being, 
and whatever finds me brings with it an irre- 
sistible evidence of its having proceeded from 
the Holy Spirit." "Whoever made this book, 
made me," said an Oriental scholar after spend- 
ing weeks in the translation of the Scriptures. 
"Wordsworth calls Coleridge "the rapt one of 
the Goddike forehead," but like the ignorant 
beggar he got his certain knowledge not 
through his vast intellect but through his 



CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. 23 

heart. He believed the Bible because of what 
happened in his own soul when he read it. 

Now consider the great figure of Christian- 
ity, the Christ, in the same manner. Draw near 
to him and watch him in the least striking 
phases of his earthly life. Look upon him as 
he sits by the side of Jacob's well, weary with 
a long walk under the hot Syrian sun, but not 
too weary to talk to a poor ignorant woman in 
such a way as to make the heavens that had 
so long frowned down upon her, glow with 
celestial light. Listen to him as he simplifies 
and clarifies the beclouded thoughts about 
spiritual things of an honest Pharisee named 
Mcodemus. Try to get into your heart the 
truth that he tried to get into the heart of 
that Jewish ruler about the necessity of a birth 
from above, of a vital touch of some heavenly 
influence, before a life can be begun here on 
the earth whose natural end is heaven. Join 
yourself to some of those eager throngs that 
gathered about him in the white sands of Gen- 
nesaret, or on the green slopes of Hattin. 
Drink in what he said to them, to you, and to 
all thirsty souls, and see if you cannot under- 
stand how they may have returned to their 
homes with a new, warm hope in their hearts, 
and with a holy purpose to live henceforth as 
if they were God's children. Had not one 



24 FKIEJNDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

who was himself evidently God's Son told 
them that they were children of God ? 

You have a conscious need of a great, pure 
soul to make realities of those high possibili- 
ties that you sometimes see vividly, and at 
other times only vaguely. Is not the Christ 
such a soul, great and pure ? Put yourself 
sincerely and unreservedly under his instruc- 
tion, yield yourself unconditionally to his in- 
fluence, you surely do not imagine that any 
harm could come of it ; obey his orders im- 
plicitly, you will find them plainly written in 
this book. Try to forgive your enemies, try 
to love everybody — it will be best to begin as 
near home as possible— try to be unselfish. 
Go so far, if you are called upon to do it, as 
to sacrifice money and time and comfort for 
your new Master's sake, and it will not be 
long before you, a skeptic, or an agnostic, 
now, will be able to say in the face of all 
skeptics and agnostics, because of what has 
happened to you, "One thing I know, that, 
whereas I was blind, now I see." 

So the evidences for Christianity are as many 
as there are persons in the earth who have ex- 
perienced its power, and these evidences in- 
crease just as rapidly as new converts are made. 
The discovery of an ancient manuscript unde- 
niably written by Pontius Pilate, or Josephus, 



CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. 25 

giving its direct testimony to the resurrection 
of Jesus Christ, would impress us tremendously. 
It would make through the eye an immediate 
and almost irresistible appeal to the intellect ; 
but the conversion of an African savage or a 
European sensualist — "rotting half a grain a 
day " — from cruelty and lust to gentleness and 
purity, or the transformation of a selfish mod- 
ern Pharisee into an humble, self-sacrificing 
helper of man, is really of much greater prac- 
tical evidential value to our hearts, though it 
may not make the same startling stroke upon 
the intellect. A few lines from the pen of a 
Pilate or a Josephus might make the presump- 
tion strong, that a divine being was once upon 
this earth for a little while some two thousand 
years ago; but the rehabilitation of broken 
lives here and there and everywhere that Christ 
is trusted and permitted to work, creates some- 
thing more than a presumption in the hearts 
of -those under whose observation these facts 
have come, that a divine being is now upon 
the earth. 

As Ive watch the hand that before it was 
raised to the cross "first strewed the snows 
on Lebanon," molding human life, tearing up 
by the roots the rank, noisome growths that 
have fastened themselves upon it, replacing the 
coarse weeds with fair and fragrant flowers, 



26 FKIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

lifting humanity, so long " poor and blind and 
scorned," from the dust, pointing upward to 
great rifts in the clouds, through which the 
light breaks, we turn not in anger, but like 
the beggar in amazed wonder, to the enemies 
of Christ and say to them, "Why, herein is 
a marvelous thing, that ye know not from 
whence he is, who has opened so many eyes, 
and has beaten out the discord of life into 
music for so many ears, and has filled so many 
hearts with new and heavenly hopes." 

It is only that sort of a personal belief in 
Christ because of what has happened to us, 
and because of what always happens to all 
who make trial of him, that can stand the 
awful shock of temptation that every soul 
must sometime meet. An intellectual con- 
viction is often as useless a weapon with 
which to fight hot passions as an icicle would 
be with which to fight a pack of wolves. 
Even if the glittering spear does not break, 
the bloodthirsty creatures care little for its 
blows, while every moment it grows smaller, 
chilling the hand that holds it ; so wiflh cold 
intellectual convictions in the fierce struggle 
with bestial appetites. " I always knew what 
was right," said a banker, who had fought with 
such a weapon, writing back from the ship on 
which he was escaping to a foreign land, " but 



CERTAINTIES IN RELIGION. 27 

religion was with me only an intellectual con- 
viction, not an active life within, influencing 
and controlling my actions ; and hence when 
temptation came to accumulate riches, I yielded 
and fell, and have lost my good name, and 
have made my family wretched." " Oh ! " he 
cries in the deep pathos of his agony, " is there 
not some truth to be so known and seen as 
to be fully appreciated, and thus poured all 
through my spiritual life, bending my will and 
feelings all beneath its folds ? " There comes 
a triumphant " yes " from a great host, who, 
like the beggar, know of what they speak, for 
they are only telling of what has happened to 
them. They have stood unshaken by tempta- 
tions before which other men as strong as they 
have gone down. They have endured trials 
and sorrows and bereavements which have 
made other men ready to curse God and die. 
They have learned to look up and to see God in 
the sky, and around, and to see him in their 
fellow men, and they have felt him in their 
own hearts ; and when they are asked to ex- 
plain it all, they may not be able to do it, but 
one thing they say, we do know, " Whereas we 
were blind now we see." 

Is there no tremor in your soul as you hear 
them repeat their short but exultant creed? 
" You would give worlds," do you say, " to be- 



28 



FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 



lieve as much ? " The light is waiting for you, 
the hand that opened their eyes to the glory 
and gladness of that light is already reached 
out to touch your own. Let the cry come now 
from your hearts, " Lord, that I may receive 
my sight."— See Luke 18 : 41. 



CHAPTEK III. 

THE KEASONABLENESS OF FAITH. 

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the 
evidence of things not seen." — Hebrews 11: 1. 

THAT faith should be cannonaded with hot 
shot is rather distressing than surprising. 
Is there anything against which revolving and 
disappearing guns have not thundered in our 
time ? All the axioms — with two or three ex- 
ceptions — those intuitive and undeniable truths 
about which we were taught in school, are 
under the pick and the drill of the mathemati- 
cian*. Once we supposed that no one ever 
could doubt " that two parallel straight lines 
would never meet, though produced to infin- 
ity." Philosophical mathematicians tell us 
now that this is a statement which we must 
make with great caution. Once we supposed 
that matter had only three dimensions — 
length, breadth and thickness. Modern schol- 
ars tell us that by far the most interesting 
dimension of matter is the fourth about which 
they do not hesitate to speak with great con- 
fidence. Even life has been attacked. It is 
said to be man's greatest enemy ; and the duty 

20 



30 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

of the wise man is to put a dagger into his 
own heart, after he has seen his children put 
daggers into theirs, and so safely escape out 
of the torture chamber of this world. If faith 
had not been assaulted in the midst of this 
general conflict it would certainly not be to 
her honor. It would seem as if she were too 
insignificant for notice. 

There are good reasons why faith in our 
time should find herself in a storm centre. 
Within the last few decades what some one has 
called — " the starry host of second causes " has 
been brought by science from obscurity. The 
effect upon the minds of many men has been 
marked. It has been not unlike the effect that 
is produced upon the mind of a savage after 
he has looked at a locomotive. He thinks the 
cause of its rapid movement is due to horses 
somewhere imprisoned in it ; and when the 
engineer takes him into the vitals of the 
engine and shows him that the whole energy 
is a little hot water, his faith in horses is 
shaken. Whenever a mystery is presented to 
him he begins to look for " hot water " as the 
explanation of it. So when men, who have 
been accustomed to think of the stars as held 
in their places by the fingers of angels or by 
the invisible hand of G-od, come to understand 
that they are sustained by gravitation, when 



THE KEASONABLENESS OF FAITH. 31 

they see that the processes of the chemical 
world are all explained up to a certain point 
by chemical affinity, when they are told that 
life, as we know it, in plants and animals is an 
evolution, their faith is shaken. They begin 
to look for some force to explain everything 
and they no longer have any need of God. 
There are certain schools of science that to 
this clay are completely dazzled with the dis- 
coveries that it is possible to make, with micro- 
scope and telescope. Examination, verification 
— these are the processes by which man is to 
arrive at truth and they do not want any 
other, — so say some of them. A Harvard pro- 
fessor has lately written that this form of 
science is interested only in that truth which 
can be technically verified. " The truth of 
truths might come in merely affirmative form 
and they would decline to touch it." That is 
indeed a very narrow school of science that 
has fallen in love, not with truth, but with its 
own methods of discovering truth. 

There is another attack upon faith that is 
much more frequent and much more serious. 
We have not only brought " a galaxy of second 
causes" out of obscurity, but we have also 
brought within sight a galaxy of comforts and 
of luxuries that fairly fill the sky. Once life 
was very simple. It consisted for the most 



32 FKIEXDS A1S T D FOES OF YOUTH. 

part in the daily struggle for daily bread. 
The greatest president of the United States 
since Washington was the son of a father and 
of a mother who could not read nor write. If 
there had been an Emancipation Proclamation 
in those days neither of them could have read 
it to their child. They were so poor that they 
looked with eyes of envy upon the comfort of 
slaves living in cabins around them. Lincoln's 
experience as a rail-splitter, as a clerk in a 
country store, as a practitioner of law in a 
little town, as an obscure politician, was not 
extraordinary for that time ; on the other 
hand it enabled him to understand the people 
of the great West. These towns and cities in 
which Lincoln lived and worked are greatly 
changed. Now "purple and fine linen" are 
sold on all the streets and at a price within 
the reach of everybody. We have far more 
luxury, infinitely more, than before the Avar ; 
and we have more pauperism also. Both lux- 
ury and pauperism are inimical to faith. Lux- 
ury chokes faith and pauperism crushes it. 

Probably no man has made a more careful 
study of life, political, social, religious, in Eng- 
land in this century than Mr. Gladstone, and 
a short time before his death he gave his opin- 
ion about the so-called decay of faith. He 
said it is largety due to the fact of the increase 



THE REASONABLENESS OF FAITH. 33 

of comfort and luxury, and of the love of 
comfort and luxury. " We have changed," he 
said, "the standard of our wants. We have 
greatly multiplied the demands of appetite. 
We have created a new atmosphere," and in 
that atmosphere it is difficult for the soul to 
breathe. He quoted Dryden's lines as sum- 
ming up the situation : 

"Two magnets, heaven and earth, allure to bliss, 
The larger loadstone that, the nearer this ; 
The weak attraction of the greater fails, 
We nod awhile, then neighborhood prevails." 

We are experiencing in our day the " de-re- 
ligionizing power of prosperity." "The gar- 
den of the Lord," as some one puts it, " has 
hidden from us as from Adam, the Lord of the 
garden." 

When a man loses faith, or when a man is 
conscious that he never had any faith to lose, 
if he will stop for a little while to think about 
it, he will notice some things that probably 
escaped his attention. He will see that the at- 
tack upon faith can only be made by faith. 
Just as the attack upon knowledge can only 
be made by knowledge. " The very act of 
denying the thinking principle, implicitly 
affirms its existence," says Mivart. When a 
man asserts of himself " I know nothing," by 



34 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

that negative statement he has made the posi- 
tive assertion that he knows something. He 
knows that he knows nothing, which is a very 
large area of knowledge for any man to be 
familiarly acquainted with. So when a man 
says, " I have no faith," by that very act he is 
making his positive assertion that he has faith : 
faith in the process of his own "intelligence 
by which and through which he has come to 
the point where, as he thinks, he has ceased to 
have any faith. 

We imagine that faith is a theological term, 
and instantly when any one speaks of it we be- 
gin to think of all the conflicts that have gone on 
in the church and amongst theologians ; but 
while faith is leading us apparently toward the 
theological field, all the fields across Avhich she 
conducts us belong to her. They may have the 
names of different proprietors upon them, but 
they are actually faith's. When you open your 
eyes to-morrow morning, your first act will be an 
act of faith. You will come, perhaps slowly, 
to the sense that it is Monday morning, and 
that you must go to work. You, you — that 
means that you have faith in your personal 
identity, that the same man who stopped work 
on Saturday night is the man who has to be- 
gin work on Monday morning. You have 
faith to believe that about the same amount 



THE REASONABLENESS OF FAITH. 35 

of energy exerted in about the same way will 
prepare you for the table, and that energy ex- 
erted by some one else, will prepare food for 
that table ; that the putting forth of the ac- 
customed degree of effort will bring you to 
the same store, or to the same office, or to the 
same school, where you were last week. 
There you will find the same tasks waiting for 
your hand, the same shuttles to be set in mo- 
tion. All this is faith. If you could blot out 
faith from the hearts of men all business and 
social activity would instantly cease. You 
know that a panic is nothing in the world but 
the loss of faith. If every one in this church 
could suddenly become convinced now that 
this roof is about to fall — though it may stand 
for a hundred years— every one would run. 
Everything comes tumbling upon the head of the 
man — in imagination at least — who loses faith. 
If you should lose all faith, you say that you 
might have to give up business and pleasure, 
but science would be left. Ah, Science ! If 
ever a man has need of faith, it is when he 
becomes a scientist. All the science that we 
have has come through faith. You say that 
you believe the world is round. How do you 
know it ? You were taught so at school. You 
say you believe the world moves around the 
sun — how do you know it ? You have taken 



36 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

it on faith. You say you believe — and you 
are rather proud of it, it puts you a little in 
advance of some of your friends — in the grad- 
ual rise of life from very primitive forms. 
Why do you believe that ? Have you verified 
it ? Do you know of yourself that any of 
these scientific assertions are true ? What if 
ten years hence it should be proved — let us 
make the supposition — that evolution is totally 
false, you would be the very first man to say, 
" Well, I always had my doubts about it. I 
sometimes talked rather in its favor, but person- 
ally I never had any knowledge of any facts that 
were sufficient to convince me." Eo you have 
not, but nine-tenths of the men who call 
themselves scientific, because they think they 
have the scientific temperament, believe that 
the world is round, that the world moves, that 
life arises from primitive forms through nat- 
ural selection and the survival of the fittest, 
just as many a man accepts the Confession 
of Faith, or the Shorter Catechism, or the 
Thirty-nine Articles — on faith. 

But you assert, " I am going to be an out 
and out scientist." "I am not going to take 
anything on faith." " I am going to bore down 
into truth for myself, and I will accept only 
what I discover." Plow far will you go with- 
out faith? Faith in the continuity of law, 



THE REASONABLENESS OF FAITH. 37 

faith in the possibility of discovering truth, 
faith in the reliability of the testimony of your 
own senses, and in the trustworthiness of your 
own intellectual processes — faith, faith, faith, 
from the beginning to the end. " Faith," so 
runs a popular definition, " is believing what 
you know isn't true." That just misses the 
truth. Faith is believing what you cannot 
know is true by the evidence of your own 
senses. " Faith is the substance of things hoped 
for, the evidence of things not seen." But you 
believe what you cannot know is true by the 
testimony of your own senses, from the testi- 
mony of some one in whom you have confi- 
dence, or by the activity of your own intelli- 
gence. 

Faith in religion is simply what faith is any- 
where else — just what it is in your shop, your 
warehouse, your office, your scientific labora- 
tory, only it is working in a higher sphere — - 
the same faculty, the same putting forth of the 
activity of the soul, only now your object is 
not the sun, nor the moon, nor the stars, nor 
certain molecules of matter, but God. No 
man hath seen God. No man can see God. 
" Faith is the substance of things hoped for, 
the evidence of things not seen." The larger 
part of your categories of belief are made up 
of things you have never seen, and can never 



38 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

see. And this was why Romanes after years 
of struggle said, " Now, I have come to see that 
faith, religions faith, is intellectually justifi- 
able " — not only justifiable, but as Newman 
tells us, " it is natural." " Faith is the natural 
hypothesis of a pure heart." When such a 
heart looks up to the heavens they " declare 
the glory of God ; and the firmament showeth 
his handywork." " It is the philosophical at- 
titude," says Lotze, the German, "for every 
thinker to take toward the mystery that passes 
the boundary of our finite wisdom." " They 
are the credulous ones," says Professor Le 
Conte, the evolutionist of California, " who, in 
a universe that is tingling with the presence 
of God, declare that they will not believe in 
him, because science does not compel them 
to utter his name." They have accepted a 
Method — and they are just as credulous to- 
ward that method as the Christian could be 
toward priest or bishop — a method which shuts 
out absolutely all the finest truth of the uni- 
verse, even if that truth does exist, by that 
method, the method of examination and verifi- 
cation, it could never be discovered. 

Faith is demonstrably a creative energy. It 
makes the universe in which we live. Believe 
that this is a wretched world ! Believe that 
men are reptilian creatures who have learned 



THE REASONABLENESS OF FAITH. 39 

in some way to walk erect, but who retain the 
old nature they had when they crawled upon 
the earth, and that will be the kind of sl world 
you will live in, and you will be that kind of a 
creature in it. Believe that this world is a 
beautiful place, a place in which men made but 
a little lower than the angels, walk erect be- 
cause they are conscious of their birthright, and 
are ready at any moment, some of them at 
least, to show that they are veritable heroes, 
God's sons, and this will be that kind of a 
world for you, and that is the kind of a man 
you will be in it. All the men who have made 
the world better, who have made us feel that 
we wanted to be better, were men of faith. 

1 'Through such souls alone 
God stooping shows sufficient of his light 
For us i' the dark to rise by." 

They had " the will to believe." " They kept 
their rudders true." They were not subservi- 
ent to wrong. They would make no compro- 
mise with iniquity ; and in that atmosphere, 
glittering truths, brighter than the stars, fill 
the sky and God comes to dwell in the heart. 



CHAPTEK IV. 

THE BIBLE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 

"Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my 
path."— Psalm 119: 105. 

THOUGH we may never have formulated 
the statement, we have almost all of us 
had the feeling that the attitude of the nine- 
teenth century toward the Bible is very differ- 
ent from that of the eighteenth century. A 
hundred years ago, this book from cover to 
cover was believed to be directly from God in 
a form very like the present. The titles of 
each of the sixty-six books, the dates when 
they were written, the names of the authors, 
were supposed to be inspired like the context 
itself. A convocation of clergymen in Europe, 
not so very many years ago, made the deliver- 
ance that the vowel points of the Hebrew were 
all inspired ; but, as there were no vowel points 
when the Hebrew Bible was written, that seems 
to have been a statement which laid an unnec- 
essary burden upon the shoulders of believers. 
Into that fair field of faith, placid and calm, 
there came certain men, called critics, with 
spades and shovels, and picks and hammers, 

40 



THE BIBLE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 41 

and dynamite bombs of documentary theories, 
and nitro-glycerine cartridges of post-exilic 
hypotheses, and began their work. Some of 
the flower-beds disappeared, and some of the 
boundaries, also. The face of things was 
changed. Every now and then great masses 
were hurled by an explosion into the air, and 
many hearts suffered. There were Christians 
who said " They are destroying our Bible ; 
nothing will be left." But there were others 
who went out and looked around with some 
doubt at first ; but, as they gazed, the cloud 
lifted and there was a smile of gladness on 
their faces. They said, " See ! here are great 
nuggets of gold that we never dreamed of 
when the garden was undisturbed, and here 
are diamonds, glistening with the fires of 
heaven. We are wealthier than ever." It is a 
different kind of wealth, it is true, but we are 
far richer than our fathers. There are still 
some whose eyes are so moist with tears that 
they cannot see these nuggets of gold and 
these glistening jewels. They are very tremu- 
lous and downcast. "If we cannot believe 
that Moses wrote the whole of the Penta- 
teuch — including the account of his own death 
— and that David wrote all of the Psalms — 
though it be specifically said that many of 
them were written by other men — and that 



42 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

Paul was the author of the Epistle to the He- 
brews, though his name is not mentioned in 
that connection by any of the early manu- 
scripts — why then we have no Bible." Many 
Protestants demand of this book just what the 
Christians of the Eoman Catholic Church de- 
mand of their hierarchy and their Priesthood — 
a closely linked system of doctrine which must 
be absolutely infallible from beginning to end, 
and which they can accept by one grasp of 
their intellects, or. of their emotions, without 
troubling themselves to consider as to the ex- 
act truth of any of the details. 

That is what we have asked of the Bible when 
we have said, ' ' All or nothing. ' ' That is no t the 
way our Lord Jesus Christ treated this book. It 
was not the way that the apostles treated it. 
Nearly all the quotations that you find in the 
New Testament from the Old Testament are 
made, not from the Hebrew, the original lan- 
guage in which the Old Testament was writ- 
ten, but from the Septuagint, the Greek trans- 
lation, which is not always literal ; and these 
quotations are made with a very broad out- 
look upon the truth. The speaker is evidently 
driving right at the heart of things and cares 
very little for the form. Our Lord censured 
the church members of that day for the way 
in which they used their Bibles. He did 



THE BIBLE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 43 

not deny the fact that they were careful stu- 
dents. He said they were. " Ye search the 
Scriptures," he says, but you never can find 
there what you are searching for, " because 
ye think that in them ye have eternal life." 
Whoever found life in a book ? " and these are 
they which testify of me." 

He taught them to take a large view of things ; 
to see that -God's revelation of himself is a proc- 
ess of which in this book we have an historical 
account. " God, who at sundry times and in 
divers manners, spake in time past unto the 
fathers by the prophets." Jesus never for a 
single moment doubted that God had spoken 
by the prophets. If you doubt that, you are 
not a higher critic. You belong in a different 
class altogether. " Gocl, who at sundry times 
and in divers manners spake in time past unto 
the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last 
days," with a very different voice, "spoken 
unto us by his Son," who was " the brightness 
of his glory, and the express image of his per- 
son." These men of the olden time were in- 
spired men. "What for ? To teach science, to 
teach philosophy ? They had no need of sci- 
ence or philosophy in those far-off days. They 
were lifted by the inspiration of God's own 
Spirit above their fellow men, that they might 
see moral, spiritual and religious truth ; and, 



44 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

seeing the truth, they narrated truthfully and 
unerringly, and, if you choose to use the word, 
" infallibly," that which they had seen. And, 
therefore, this book becomes just what the 
Westminster Confession of Faith says it is — 
not the only infallible rule of science or philos- 
ophy — that is not what it teaches — but " the 
only infallible rule of faith and practice." 

" Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a 
light unto my path." If you will read it with 
that thought, you will feel, I am sure, how ex- 
actly the whole question is stated by that good 
old bishop, for whom the great statesman, 
William E. Gladstone, had such an unfeigned 
admiration. Mr. Gladstone had been spending 
the last years of his life in reediting Bishop 
Butler's works. You remember the "Anal- 
ogy " you worried over in your college course ? 
Bishop Butler says, " The only question con- 
cerning the truth of Christianity is, whether it 
be a real revelation, not whether it be attended 
with every circumstance which we should have 
looked for; and concerning the authority of 
Scripture, Avhether it be what it claims to be — ■ 
not whether it is a book of such sort and so 
promulgated as weak men are bound to fancy 
a book containing divine revelation should be : 
and therefore neither obscurity nor seeming 
inaccuracy of style, nor various readings, nor 



THE BIBLE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 45 

early disputes about the authors of particular 
parts, nor any other things of the like kind, 
though they had been much more considerable 
in degree than they are, could overthrow the 
authority of the Scriptures unless the prophets, 
apostles, or our Lord had promised that the 
book containing the divine revelation should 
be secured from those things." 

What God purposed to do was not to make 
a hook, but to make men, and in order to make 
men it was necessary to give them a revelation 
that they might know what kind of a universe 
they are living in, and whether or not it is 
under the sway of truth and justice. So this 
book begins with the statement that there is 
one God. " In the beginning God created the 
heaven and the earth." Naturally men are 
polytheists. Naturally they believe that every 
element has a god in it. Naturally they play 
one of these gods against the other: They 
serve one of them for a little while, and when 
they get tired of that god then they turn and 
serve the next. But this book makes its clear 
ringing statement that in all the universe there 
is but one God ; and the man who serves that 
God, the God of truth and righteousness in 
truth and rectitude may be sure that God is on 
his side. Never from any other scriptures has 
such a statement come. 



46 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

The book opens with an account of man's 
wandering ont of Paradise, — of the thwarting, 
so far as it is possible, of the will of God by 
the will of man ; but it quickly makes its glad 
announcement to the soul of the simple con- 
ditions on which men are to be received back. 
All the details of the Old Testament are simply 
a filling in, by an historical account, of how 
men continued to wander, and hoAV some of 
them came back to God. These first books 
strike a low note. They narrate historic facts, 
and often of a commonplace sort. • Now and 
then they tell the story of some great man, an 
Abraham, a Moses, a David, an Isaiah — " Sig- 
nals " they have been called " sent up to show 
the kind of men the world needed " — the kind 
of men God makes when he is permitted to 
come into a life and do as he likes with it. 
Then as you read on; vaguely at first, but 
growing more and more distinct, there emerges 
a figure — that figure, as some one has said 
" that haunts all Hebrew history and makes it 
all poetic " — the figure of the Messiah. There 
shall come one greater than Abraham, greater 
than Moses, greater than David, greater than 
Isaiah — this is the message of the Old Testa- 
ment. " This is he," is the message of the 
New. All the latter part of this book is given 
to the story of Christ's life — the life of the Son 



THE BIBLE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 47 



of man, the Son of God : to his birth, bap- 
tism and temptation, to the calling and train- 
ing of his disciples, to his teaching, to his 
denial, to his betrayal, to his crucifixion, to his 
resurrection, to the coming of the Spirit that 
he promised, to the development of the Chris- 
tian church, to the trials of that church ; and 
when you turn to the last book, the book of 
Eevelation, to the eternal triumph of that 
church. " The whole history of man from the 
hour when he goes out of Paradise to the hour 
when he returns to Paradise, is in this book, 
stated or suggested." 

I think we can see that it is not the kind of 
book that has to rely on the testimony of a 
tablet that was dug up yesterday or last year 
in Egypt or in Syria. As a matter of fact 
nearly all these tablets that have been dug up 
do testify to the historical accuracy of this 
book— but it does not rest on them. It does 
not depend on the testimony of a few, a half 
dozen or more, great scholars, who began, as 
they have told us themselves, to study the 
book with the intention of showing how un- 
reliable it was, and have been obliged to right 
about face and spend the closing years of their 
lives in a glad and joyous effort to show the 
world how splendidly true it is. All that is 
very well, but it has comparatively little to do 



48 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

with the case. It is not a book that depends 
on the solution of a difficulty as to how it 
could ever have been possible for the sun to 
stand still, or how a prophet could spend 
a day and a night in the belly of a whale 
floating around in the Mediterranean Sea. It 
is a totally different kind of book from that. 
You may read it if you like in such a way that 
your eye will only be caught by the drift-wood 
on the surface ; or you may read it in such a 
way, that as you look at the drift-wood, you 
will see that the very flotsam and jetsam of it 
show that the mighty current flowing through 
it, is toward God. 

It is a book that leads men away from sin to 
holiness. It is a book that makes man tremble 
with the very privilege of life here in this uni- 
verse of God, that tells man that he is a child of 
God, a brother also of all God's children with 
obligations to them. It is a book that inspires 
him, when he is oppressed as he looks at the uni- 
verse with the overwhelming weight that rests 
on his soul, of law, of immensity, of endless time 
and endless space. " What am I," he says, " a 
mere atom in such a universe ? " and this book 
tells him he is beloved of God, and round about 
him are the arms of the eternal Father. It is 
a book that opens up before his vision the one 
perfect, faultless life, and assures him as he 



THE BIBLE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 49 

looks longingly to the Christ, " This is what a 
Son of God ought to be," and this is what 
you some day will be, if you are a submissive 
child of God. 

Ah, tell me, rationalist, what is the most 
reasonable explanation of the origin of such a 
book ? Was it made by man ? Was it made 
by molecules that have happened somehow or 
another to come together in a universe where 
there is nothing but matter and the phenomena 
of matter ? One of the greatest of the Ger- 
man scholars, Ewald, said with* a trembling 
voice to Dean Stanley, as he took up a volume 
of the Bible that was lying upon his table, 
" All the best wisdom of the world is in that 
book." " Sunrise and sunset, birth and death, 
prophecy and fulfilment," said the German, 
Heine, "the great drama of humanity are 
here." " It is the world's book of consolation," 
said Eenan. Goethe and Lessing, Bacon and 
Faraday, Milton and Shakespeare, Words- 
worth, Browning and Tennyson — all stand and 
listen sympathetically to our simple American 
poet, Whittier, as he says : 

" We search the world for truth ; we cull 
The good, the pure, the beautiful, 
From graven stone and written scroll, 
From all flower fields of the soul ; 



50 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

Aud weary seekers of the best 

We come back laden from our quest, 

To find that all the sages said 

Is in this Book our mothers read." 

But a little faith of our own is a great deal 
better than all the faith of the philosophers 
and the poets and the sages and even mothers. 
This is a book that has brought men to God. 
It is a book that has inspired men to live heroic 
lives ; it is a book that has broken the shackles 
of passion and evil desire. "What has it done 
for us ? What is it doing ? The great danger 
of the present day is not modern thought^ but 
modern thoughtlessness. The difficulty is not 
that critics are reading this book, but that 
some of us are not. They who a little while 
ago seemed about to tear this Bible out of our 
hands, are our best friends, if they have made 
us clutch it more lovingly to our hearts. For 
it is a book that has God in it, and hope and 
heaven ; and it is a book that flings the light 
we need on the storm-swept pathway of this 
earthly life. 



CHAPTEK Y. 

CHEISTIANITY AND OTHEE EELIGIONS. 

"Ye men of Athens, in all things I perceive that ye are 
very religious." (American Eevised Version) — Acts 17 : 22. 

WHEN" we speak of scientific skepticism, 
it is comparatively easy for us to think 
of some one we know who is skeptical, and 
who is somewhat scientific. But the mention 
of other religions beside Christianity calls up 
no such concrete conception. For the most 
part we may be said not to know any one who 
is* religious at all, who does not nominally ac- 
cept of Christianity. There are, it is true, 
other religions that have found protection and 
liberty bejieath the stars and stripes. There 
are the American Indians, the original pro- 
prietors of the soil, who worship God ; but it 
is impossible to believe that the God to whom 
they pray is the God to whom we pray. Their 
God — we acknowledge there is a large possibil- 
ity of mistake here on our part — their God 
seems to us very like the deified ghost of some 
dead chieftain. There are the Mongolians who 
have their Joss houses in retired corners of 
51 



52 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

streets in some of our largest cities. They 
offer their candles and their paper money to 
their gods, and worship before the tablets of 
their ancestors. Far out on one of our western 
plains, there is a city with a temple and an 
enormous tabernacle, in which strange things 
are done. That city, and the state of which 
that city is a significant part, are entirely 
under the eontrol of a religious sect altogether 
incomprehensible to us. How was it possible, 
in this day of light, that a superstition such as 
that should have been manufactured by design- 
ing men to rule the minds and the souls of the 
ignorant ? In nearly all our large towns among 
the religious notices, you will find the an- 
nouncement of meetings of Spiritualists, and 
Christian Scientists, and even of Theosophists ; 
but the aggregate of these religionists is small, 
and the distance of their thought from our 
thought is so great that were we called upon 
suddenly we might say " There is no religion 
in the United States except Christianity." 

But when we cross the ocean and visit the 
old world, a new phenomenon presents it- 
self to us for the first time possibly, unless we 
have been careful students of comparative re- 
ligions. We are face to .face with the con- 
viction that there was a time when men were 
religious, but when our religion was unknown ; 



CHBISTIANTTY. 53 

and when it began to be known, it was. con- 
sidered an intruder. Those broad blocks of 
stone in the Roman forum against which you 
strike your cane were many a time pressed by 
the feet of priests in gorgeous procession wind- 
ing along up the hill to offer sacrifice to Jupiter 
Capitolinus. It is often said that the bronze 
statue in the great Cathedral of Michael An- 
gelo is in reality one of the statues of Jupiter 
now consecrated to St. Peter. 

A few hundred miles south of Eome in the 
marshes of Paestum you look upon temples of 
such faultless proportions that your eyes grow 
moist. You recall the fact that here in these 
temples long before Rome was built, the 
Greeks worshipped gods unknown to the 
Roman — Zeus and Apollo and Athene. When 
you sail away to Alexandria and up the Nile, 
you will find on every slope of the hills, in- 
stead of such ruined castles as hang over the 
Rhine, temples, massive, colossal. You come 
at last to the exquisite island of Philae, and 
there in a building which is in almost perfect 
preservation you read the story of Osiris and 
Isis, and of the long fierce conflict between the 
religions of Egypt and Syria, and it seems 
amazing to you that the time ever should have 
been when that whole land was filled with 
multitudes who were worshipping their gods 



54 FRIENDS AND FOES OE YOUTH. 

in these temples, now given over to the bats 
that fly screaming toward your flaming torch, 
and to the owls that moan their sad dirge 
over the past. 

But as you shoot across the Bosphorus in a 
caique, and look up at Constantinople, that 
fair city sitting like a queen upon the hills, 
you see buildings that were not temples and 
are not churches, though they may once have 
been consecrated to Christ. Here is the polit- 
ical capital and centre of Christianity's most 
persistent and aggressive enemy. Here Mos- 
lemism reigns supreme, and Mohammedism 
is a spiritual mongrel between Judaism and 
Christianity. A Moslem assassinates, with ab- 
solute impartiality, the Christian on the right 
hand and the Jew on the left. Alas for those 
miserable creatures given over so shamelessly 
by the European powers to the mercy of such 
a monster ! 

India is a land of religions. Her temples 
are more massive even than the temples of 
Egypt. Their architecture is more weird. 
They rise in lofty terraces. Tower springs 
above tower, pinnacle above pinnacle amid a 
forest of statues. The chief religion of India, 
Hinduism, is as vital as Mohammedism. It 
has in it the vitality of the tiger and the cobra. 
That man you see walking yonder on the 



CHRISTIANITY. 55 

street, carrying a burden is a Sudra, an out- 
cast. For a thousand generations all his an- 
cestors were Sudras, outcasts ; for a thousand 
times a thousand generations his descendants 
will be Sudras, outcasts. Society owes him, as 
it owed his ancestors, and will owe his succes- 
sors, nothing but contempt. This is the teach- 
ing of his religion. That man over on the 
corner of the street is a Brahman, deified in 
the thought of the Sudra as a God. If a 
Brahman smiles on you, you may go on your 
way with an assured blessing. If you should 
chance to drink one drop of water taken from 
a puddle in which that Brahman had put his 
foot you would be certain of heaven ! 

In Benares, after you have looked at men 
and women worshipping cows and monkeys, 
you may take a journey of only a day or two 
out into the country to the birthplace of 
Gautama. Some twenty-four hundred years 
ago almost, that young prince founded a reli- 
gion. It is to-day the spiritual shelter of more 
human souls .than any other form of belief. 
It was a protest against Hinduism, against the 
ironclad separation between the Sudra and 
the Brahman. But like the protest that came 
in Italy against the ancient church which suc- 
ceeded only for a little time, so Buddhism 
finally was swept out of India by the older 



56 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

and more corrupt faith. You will find no 
Buddhists to-day except in the far south on the 
island of Ceylon. You see them everywhere 
in Japan. Hundreds of temples and scores of 
Buddhist priests in each, in vestments very 
like those of the church of Borne, and the 
whole ceremonial is so similar to that of the 
Eomish church that a bishop once said " The 
devil has been here before us and has stolen 
our service." 

In China, you hear only the name of Con- 
fucius. Confucius had nothing to say about 
God. He had a great deal to say about man. 
He gave his disciples rules of the minutest 
sort. A true Confucian cannot take a jour- 
ney, or bury the dead, or begin any business 
enterprise till after consultation with those to 
whom the vision of the future has been given. 

These are the living religions to-day : Mo- 
hammedism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Con- 
fucianism. 

You must not forget that the only answers 
hundreds of millions of human beings have to 
the great questions that perplex men about 
God, about duty, about immortality, come to 
them either from Mohammedism or Brahman- 
ism, or Buddhism, or Confucianism. They 
have each taken up the problem of life, and 
they have each tried to solve it, but their an- 



CHRISTIANITY. 57 

swer strikes a note so high, or a note so low, 
that the human heart does not respond. 

We owe a great deal to the brilliant scholars 
who during the last twenty-five years have de- 
voted themselves almost entirely to the study 
of these various religions. Before that time, 
almost nothing was known of the Oriental 
faiths. JSTow they have been examined scien- 
tifically, and I think in a single word you may 
honestly say that the impression upon the 
minds of the men who have been most earnest 
in their study is like that on the mind of an 
Oxford professor, who at one time was tempted 
to place some of the other religions almost on 
an equality with Christianity, but who said 
three years ago, " I see it is Christianity — or 
nothing." 

When Christianity came to the world, it was 
like the coming of the sun to men who were grop- 
ing in the darkness with their rush lights. And 
these lights, the best lights their gods could give 
them, suddenly went out, swallowed up in the 
larger light. It was so with the gods of Eome. 
There was no direct assault of Christianity upon 
the Koman gods. They simply disappeared. 
Professor Freeman says "That Christianity 
should become the religion of the Eoman Em- 
pire is the miracle of history, but that it did so 
become is the leading fact of all history." So 



58 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

with the gods of Greece. Their lights went out. 
The gods of the Saxon, and the gods of the Goth, 
and the gods of the Hun, disappeared in the 
full light of day. "They put their fleshless 
fingers over their eyeless sockets and stole 
silently away." So it must be some day with 
the gods of the Brahman, and the gods of the 
Buddhist, so too with the iron Fate of Mo- 
hammedism — surely men will not consent to 
live on forever in the gloom, when they may 
throw open the shutters and let in the glorious 
light of the Rising Sun. 

Christianity is the only religion that has any 
moral energy in it. Does that seem to you an 
exaggeration ? If you take a saint from any 
of these other religions, and when you find there 
is no moral goodness in him — he need have 
none of the qualities we call virtues to be a 
saint — I think you may fairly say there is no 
moral energy in such a religion. A Moham- 
medan saint, a Hindu saint, a Buddhist saint 
may have committed theft and murder, may 
have broken every one of the ten command- 
ments, and yet be in the odor of sanctity. 
There is absolutely nothing in his religion that 
forbids these things under certain circum- 
stances. As we know — alas, too well — there 
is a great deal in these religions that com- 
mands murder under certain circumstances. 



CHRISTIANITY. 59 

Every Mohammedan that puts his knife to the 
throat of an infidel Christian has not only the 
satisfaction of killing one he hates, but the 
satisfaction also of having made paradise a 
little more certain. 

Christianity comes to us as a religion with 
documents — documents that he who runs may 
read. There are sixty-six of them. And in 
no one of them is there anything shown to be 
an absurdity by the latest science of our own 
day. If you take the sacred books of the other 
religions, — the Koran, the Yedas, the writings 
of Confucius, it is utterly impossible to read a 
dozen pages without feeling that these are the 
books of the past ; they are antiquated ; they 
come to us without any evidence of authority. 
These documents of Christianity make no ef- 
fort to concentrate attention upon themselves. 
They rather aim to withdraw it and to centre 
it — those in the first half of this book— upon a 
person who was to come, and these in the lat- 
ter half, upon a person who has come. That 
person we call the Messiah, the Christ, Jesus 
of Nazareth. *He appeared in the full light of 
history, but history does not explain him. It 
is said that " History can explain everything 
except the spirit of Jesus." He explains his- 
tory. Professor Miiller, one of the great Ger- 
man scholars who devoted years to the study 



60 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

of history, tells us that in later life he acci- 
dentally picked up a New Testament. Of 
course he had read it many times before, and 
" I opened it," he said, in substance, " with the 
greatest prejudice : I thought it was an out- 
grown book; but as I read on and on — it 
seemed to me as if scales were falling from my 
eyes, as if God had put a key into my hand by 
which I could open door after door that had 
always been closed to me, and I came for the 
first time to understand the history of human- 
ity through Jesus Christ. There is nothing 
now that I cannot explain." 

"All things grow sweet in him, 
In him all things are reconciled. 
All fierce extremes that beat along life's shore 
Like chidden waves grow mild 
And creep to kiss his feet." 

All authority is in Jesus Christ. The church 
may call itself infallible — so may bishops, so 
may councils, so may presbyteries, only, as the 
years pass, to have themselves shown palpably 
in the wrong ; but has one error ever yet been 
discovered in the teachings of#Jesus Christ? 
Can that teaching ever become obsolete or ob- 
solescent? Think of what Jesus has said 
about the home, about the family, about the 
state, about society ! Remember that he has 
laid his emphasis on love, and is love ever to 



CHRISTIANITY. 61 

be outgrown? Remember that it is Jesus 
who has lifted the veil, and shown us the heart 
of God. " God so loved the world " we often 
say and sing. Who was it that taught us 
that? Who was it that taught us to say, 
" Our Father who art in heaven " ? Who was 
it that told us that this Father in heaven is a 
great brooding personality of infinite love, by 
whom every man is swayed and by whom he 
is being lifted, if he be submissive, to such 
heights, as he has never climbed even in his 
dreams ? Men say that Ave idealize Jesus 
Christ. Ah, no. " Jesus Christ is engaged in 
idealizing us," as some one has said, and " his 
work is not yet completed." 

He tells man whence he came, what he is, 
whither he is going. He announces to man 
his freedom ; that he is here in God's great 
school, — that he may be drilled and trained, and 
rebuilt and made ready for home. In the 
midst of a world that is disintegrating, under 
a sun that is dying out, in a body that is 
slowly perishing day by day, Jesus says the 
soul of man has in it eternity. The religion 
of Jesus is the only religion that looks forward 
with the eyes of hope. Other religions are 
sad. You hear the pathos of them in every 
sigh of their worshippers ; but the religion of 
Jesus is bright and buoyant. It has pardon 



62 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

for the past, peace for the present, triumph 
for the future. No man who believes in the 
incarnation of the Son of God can be other 
than an optimist. That you are not a Chris- 
tian, that you are not fighting in the ranks of 
Jesus Christ — is for a man of your training 
and intelligence, so wholly inexcusable that no 
other regret can be so poignant in the clear 
light of that eternity which lies just before 
you. 



CHAPTER YI. 

CONSCIENCE. 

"Which show the work of the law written in their 
hearts, their conscience also bearing witness." — Romans 
2: 15. 

I IN" the moral upheavals to which our age and 
nation are specially prone — for this is not 
the most stable of times nor are we the most 
stable of people — the future of a human life, its 
entire destiny, may hang on the clearness with 
which we see certain things as real, though 
they may have no mathematical equivalents. 
Men whom we thought incarnate goodness 
may be villains, tenets of a creed supposed 
to be infallible, may be false, but truth exists 
still— scientific truth, historic truth, and in 
the sphere of morals truths quite as indubi- 
table. 

Plunge into whatever epoch of the world's 
history you choose, it will be immediately 
evident that it is not more certain that there 
is such a being as man, than that there is in 
man a conscience, a faculty, a something be- 
cause of which right is one thing to him and 

63 



64 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

wrong another. "It is not so much," it has 
been said, "that man has conscience as that 
conscience has man." There are ways from 
which he is driven back by flaming swords ; 
there are ways into which he is drawn by in- 
visible cords. It was only before the Hebrews 
that the pillar of cloud went by day and the 
pillar of fire by night, but in the moral heav- 
ens of every people, God has set his pillar of 
cloud and fire. The race would have perished 
centuries ago in the bleak, howling wastes of 
indescribable horrors, without this beacon 
light to lure it forward toward a better land. 
No nation, no city has ever been so corrupt 
as to lose all power of discrimination between 
good and evil. Corinth, eighteen centuries 
ago, was the synonym of soft luxurious vice ; 
but the Corinthian saw with his lack-lustre 
eyes the beauty of holiness when an apostle 
held before him the life of t-he crucified, and 
Corinth to us recalls Christian virtues rather 
than pagan vices. Borne was ruled by a Nero 
when Paul wrote this epistle. Perhaps no 
mortal has ever so rioted in the most degrad- 
ing crimes possible to man, as this emperor of 
the world. Things that devils think of, he did, 
and his nobles were not shocked, they followed 
but a little way behind : but, wallowing as 
ruler and people were in the mire of a besotted 



t 



CONSCIENCE. 65 

life, the heavens were not wholly black above 
their heads. If virtue was dead, in the most 
terrible days of Roman history, the feeling 
was still in the hearts of those who had as- 
sassinated it that a foul murder had been done. 

Philosophers of every school have stood in 
amazed awe before this sense in man that can 
never be wholly destroyed. "The starry 
heavens above and the moral law within " 
were to Kant, the philosopher of Konigsberg, 
the most wonderful of all the marvels in God's 
universe. Jurists like Webster have pondered 
over it, and have confessed, as this greatest of 
forensic orators did, "that man's moral re- 
sponsibility to his God is the grandest thought 
that ever entered the mind of man." Poets 
like Shakespeare and Byron and Yictor Hugo, 
who have gone with their torches into every 
chamber of the human heart, have found noth- 
ing there more startling than this. 

But this fact of conscience, so undeniable, so 
unspeakably momentous, men are trying to 
dessicate and explain away. It is the product, 
they say, of heredity, of development ; its 
rudiments are to be found in the lower ani- 
mals : our household pets exhibit signs of it 
when* they slink away after certain acts, and 
come eagerly with the evident expectancy of a 
caress after others. Whatever that is, say the 



6b FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

men of this school, it needs only enlargement 
to become what we choose to call conscience. 
But there is no resemblance whatever between 
the two, as a moment's thought will show, un- 
less we have a theory to which the facts must 
be fitted. In those animals of which we make 
pets and companions, this sense they exhibit 
of an apparent conviction that reward or pun- 
ishment has been merited, is only a keen an- 
ticipation of certain consequences which they 
have learned by experience usually follow cer- 
tain actions of theirs when discovered. Let 
these consequences cease for a time, and both 
the hope and fear once so clearly marked will 
disappear. There is in the animal, of what- 
ever sort, not the slightest comprehension of 
right as right regardless of consequences ; but 
it is just this that man has. He has crystallized 
it into a thousand sayings : he cries, " Let 
justice be done, though the heavens fall." 
Better still he has crystallized it into ten thou- 
sand heroic deeds, in which, at the cost of 
every comfort, of every hope, of life itself, he 
has been true to his convictions of right and 
duty. No chance, however fortuitous, could 
ever have developed a quality like this, so unre- 
lated to and disassociated from the life of the 
clod and the brute. As Carlyle says of his hero, 
Frederick the Great, " to him, as to all of us, 



CONSCIENCE. 67 

it was flatly inconceivable that intellect, moral 
emotion conld have been put into him by an 
entity that had none of its own." 

If the existence and origin of conscience will 
not disappear in a cloud of words, its impor- 
tance may be diminished, so some hope, by dis- 
crediting its authority. It is so variable, it is 
said, as to be untrustworthy, and therefore 
practically useless. Even Pascal declared that 
conscience is one thing north and another 
thing south of the Pyrenees. What wrong is 
there that conscience has not at some time or 
place permitted ! Saul probably felt no in- 
ward turmoil while he held the long cloaks of 
the young men who needed free limbs and un- 
impeded movements to stone an innocent man, 
a saint, to death. Loyola and Torquemada 
were filled with peace and holy joy it may be, 
as they tore out the tongues of heretics, and 
roasted women and children over slow fires, 
and stretched old men on the rack till bone 
and muscle cracked and broke. Those days 
have passed, but there are conscientious men in 
this nineteenth century who detest Loyola and 
Torquemada perhaps, but who have been 
scarcely less cruel : devout Christian men who 
have bought and sold human flesh, who have 
torn children from their mother's arms, who 
have pursued with bloodhounds a husband es« 



68 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

caping to his wife, a son to his father ; who have 
burned deep in the quivering, smoking flesh of 
the recaptured slave the initials of the man 
who owned him, body and soul. 

It is not only at cruelty that conscience has 
winked, but at chicanery and fraud, at prevari- 
cation and untruth. As the hand becomes 
callous in spots by continual use, so that a keen 
observer might almost read the story of a life 
from a palm, so a man's conscience may, and 
often does, bear the marks of his particular 
business or profession. It has its areas, smaller 
or larger, of hard impervious callousness. 
There are manufacturers, it is said, whose 
consciences suffer no pain as they adulterate 
their goods, mix cotton with wool or silk, lead 
with silver, brass with gold. There are mer- 
chants, it is asserted, whose consciences feel no 
twinge as they transform by an assertion 
American products into English or French, or 
lengthen out a deficient measure, or warrant 
the washableness of materials to which water 
is as dangerous as to hydrophobia. Yet the 
word of both manufacturer and merchant for 
the payment of a debt might be as good as a 
bond; either would rather fail than defraud 
you of a dollar — except in the way of legiti- 
mate business. There are lawyers, they say, 
whose consciences slumber peacefully as they 



CONSCIENCE. 69 

attempt to confuse the logic of the jury, and 
cover with all possible and impossible imagi- 
nary virtues a man whom they know to be 
guilty ; but outside the courtroom or the office 
they may be the soul of truth and honor. 
There are doctors, it is claimed, whose con- 
sciences make no protest while they bear false 
witness as to the abilities of their neighbors, 
physicians like themselves, or steal away their 
patients without breaking the code of profes- 
sional etiquette ; but they will spend long 
nights in relieving distress, often with no hope 
or thought of pecuniary reward, and they will 
stand and die, as many a good physician has, 
in the fatal fumes of some contagious disease, 
from whose clutches they have tried to rescue 
some poor suffering creature. There are minis- 
ters whose consciences — but of that the pew 
probably could speak more honestly than the 
pulpit. 

Of the church member's conscience we may 
venture to say a word ; it permits him to stay 
away from church or prayer meeting, but 
never from a business or a social engagement, 
when it rains, or is hot or cold, or a hundred 
other unfortunate meteorological conditions 
arise ; it allows him to work when he feels like 
it, and in the particular way he may choose, 
though he calls himself the slave of Christ ; to 



70 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

pay or not, as he sees fit, for the support of 
the church of which he is a member, and to 
contribute much or little, not as the Lord has 
prospered him, but as the mood takes him, to 
the benevolence of the church for its manifold 
needs at home and abroad. It would shriek 
its maledictions in his ears, if he should deny, 
or even question one of the Thirty-nine Articles, 
or a single dogma of the Confession of Faith ; 
but it makes no protest at the absence of love, 
which is the fulfilling of the law, the heart of 
the Gospel, the first article in God's creed. It 
compels him to take off his hat in a con- 
secrated building, or in the Orient to remove 
his shoes, but for his own body, the temple of 
the Holy Ghost, he has no reverence ; and he 
would wipe his feet, if it pleased him, on the 
most cherished privileges of some one weaker 
than himself. 

Yet Kant, who stood in wonder before the 
starry heavens above and the moral law 
within, said that an " erring conscience is a 
chimera." Then was Saul right ? were Lo- 
yola and Torquemada right, and all the fierce 
hordes who hunted down the Yaudois and 
Huguenots in France, and our Puritan and 
Presbyterian fathers in England and Scotland ? 
Is the manufacturer, the merchant, the lawyer, 
the doctor, the church member each right in 



CONSCIENCE. 71 

his own way ? Does conscience make no mis- 
takes ? Is it infallible ? Certainly not, if the 
popular idea of conscience is the true one, that 
it is the soul's sense of right and wrong ; for 
the tragedy of its errors has filled the world 
with groans and tears. But if conscience be 
as defined, " The soul's sense of right and 
wrong in its moral motives, that is in its 
choices and intentions," then we can under- 
stand what Kant, and many like him have 
meant when they have called an erring con- 
science a chimera. Saul and Loyola and 
Torquemada, and persecutors as fierce, of un- 
known names,fired by their spirit may have been 
conscientious, and, though in the wrong, their 
consciences made no mistake, and they chose 
what they thought right ; but their judgments 
were warped and wide of the mark. A man 
may choose the wrong believing it to be the 
right, and conscience will be still : he may 
choose the right from some unworthy motive, 
and thinking it the wrong, and conscience will 
strike ; for conscience is not the soul's sense of 
right and wrong., but " The soul's sense of right 
and wrong in its moral motives, in its choices 
and intentions." No man has any doubt as 
to what he means to do ; conscience then is 
infallible, though we are all very often in 
doubt whether it is best to turn to the right 



72 FEIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

or to the left. Conscience has nothing to say 
then, that is an affair of judgment. 

That education may have a very decided 
effect on conscience indirectly, through judg- 
ment, must be at once apparent. The con- 
science of a Zulu chief or of an English philos- 
opher is alike unerring. Each knows infallibly, 
in every act, whether his motive, his choice has 
been of what he thought right or wrong ; but 
the African savage may possibly be breaking 
most of the ten commandments every hour of 
every day, for his judgment is wholly unen- 
lightened. He must be taught, as all children 
must, though in your most civilized homes, 
in which category things belong. Conscience 
tells neither the savage nor the child that it is 
wrong to lie, or steal, or kill ; but when judg- 
ment is enlightened up to that point, con- 
science will infallibly warn against these for- 
bidden acts. If conscience always told man 
what was right and what was wrong, we never 
should have had the ten commandments given 
from Sinai, and the enlarged and fuller ex- 
planation of our duties given by the Holy 
Spirit through the prophets and apostles. 
These were sent because man's judgment in 
morals needed to be educated ; that conscience 
might have all the facts before it while mak- 
ing its decision. 



CONSCIENCE. 73 

But, of all forms of education, none has such 
a direct and immediate effect on conscience as 
the education we each, give ourselves by the 
daily choices we make. A man may do wrong 
so persistently that at last his judgment is 
fatally blinded. As you have seen vines and 
creepers covering the wall of some cottage or 
church till you could scarcely tell whether the 
building was of wood or stone ; or spreading 
themselves still with every summer till the win- 
dows were first arched and then hidden,- — dark- 
ened as by the closing of a shutter, so a rank, 
fatal growth may spread itself over a man's life, 
covering at last all the windows through which 
the light once entered the soul, and judgment 
and conscience alike must do their work in the 
dark. But even in that thick darkness con- 
science does not die ; it can still sting if noth- 
ing else. A man may have lost the power of 
acting conscientiously, but he has not lost, and 
can never lose, the power of suffering from the 
pangs of conscience. Remorse is a word the 
depths of whose terribleness no mortal has 
ever fathomed. No inquisitor ever had such 
instruments of torture at his command. 
What rack, what thumb-screw, what tearing 
of the flesh by red-hot pincers could have 
wrung from a royal murderer such shrieks of 
horror, low but deep, as Shakespeare thought 



71 FKIENDS ATs T D FOES OF YOUTH. 

he heard on the lips of Richard, and which 
have, in fact, echoed through many a palace as 
well as through a poet's brain ? 

" My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, 
And every tongue brings in a several tale, 
And every tale coudemus me for a villain. 

"Methought the souls of all that I had murdered 
Came to my tent, and every one did threat 
To-morrow's vengeance on the head of Richard." 

They who have looked deepest into the sense 
the soul has of right and wrong in motives and 
choices have seen the most. In the feeling 
every man has of obligation to choose the 
right and reject the wrong, they have found 
God. It is not altogether to ourselves, or to 
our fellow men, or to the laws of the state, 
that we are responsible. All these might 
unite in urging us to wrongdoing, but above 
them all is eternal right and truth, not an ab- 
straction but an eternally true and righteous 
Person. So the one word " ought " outweighs 
home and country and self, for God is in it. 
When you yield yourself to duty you } r ield to 
God ; you become, as Chrysostom says, " His 
true shekinah," and the hand you lay upon 
your own heart covers the Eternal who dwelt 
once in the Holiest of Holies on Mt. Moriah. 

So, too, in that sense of obligation lies the 



CONSCIENCE. 75 

assurance of man's freedom. He may choose 
good or evil, and the choice is his own ; no fate 
urges him irresistibly to the right or to the left, 
to heaven or to hell ; no decrees of election or 
reprobation harness or fetter the liberty of de- 
cision. No system of theology can stand un- 
less it be large enough to include this word 
" ought " in every dogma, or that monosyllable 
will burst into a thousand fragments the thick- 
est coverings that the subtlest human thought 
can weave around it. 

So, too, in that sense of obligation lies the 
assurance of man's immortality. It comes 
perhaps at first as an instinctive dread of a 
tribunal where human judgments are to be re- 
versed, and wrongs to be righted. Men who 
have escaped all the meshes of human law 
have thought of death as the unavoidable of- 
ficer of an unerring justice, into whose flaming 
eyes they must look. " The dread of some- 
thing after death " is their perpetual torment ; 
to them 

"The weariest and most loathed worldly life 
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment 
Can lay on nature is a paradise 
To what we fear of death." 

God has placed this mount that cannot be 
touched in the heart, not to send forth cease- 
less thunderings to terrify and affright, but to 



76 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

turn the eyes and hopes of man away from the 
Sinai of justice to the Calvary of love. We 
should all have reason to dread the future 
where there is no. such vision. We, too, have 
chosen evil. Not alone our judgment, but our 
wills have been at fault. "We have done 
wrong, not thinking that it was right, but that 
in some way it might add to the agreeableness 
of life. We have sinned : " Perhaps God can 
forgive sin," said Socrates, " but I do not see 
how." The cross is the answer. The love 
that dies will pardon and redeem. The con- 
science, contaminated and denied, whose stains 
the whole ocean could not wash away, may be 
cleansed in the purifying waters of the bound- 
less love of the Son of God. 



CHAPTEK TIL 

DUTY. 

"We have done that which was our duty to do." — Luke 
17 : 10. " Furthermore then we beseech you, brethren, and 
exhort you by the Lord Jesus, that as ye have received of 
us how ye ought to walk and to please God, so ye would 
abound more and more." — I. Thess. 4: 1. 

WE find no labored explanation of the 
nature of duty in this Book of books. 
There is no elaborate argument to prove 
that it exists. It is everywhere assumed as 
a fact present in every human consciousness, 
and like an axiom is its own best demonstra- 
tion and explanation. These Thessalonians 
had received special instruction from the apos- 
tle how they " ought to walk," but it was not 
because they had read his epistle that a feeling 
of "oughtness" sprung to life within them; 
that was always there, long before they had 
known Paul or the religion of which he was a 
messenger. This " Stern daughter of the voice 
of God," as duty has been called, stood by 
their cradles, and they came to know her face 
almost as quickly as their mothers'. 

Christianity could not have found a place to 
77 



78 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

rest the sole of her foot if this sense of duty 
in human hearts had not given her a base of 
operations from which to advance her resist- 
less forces. Wherever her missionaries went 
they were able to appeal confidently to this 
feeling that all men have in a more or less 
marked degree, as to what they ought to be 
and to do ; and the message they had to bring 
answers to this as light answers to the eye. 

In this feeling of obligation is not only a 
latent philosophy bnt a theology. Mark the 
inferences that we are constrained to draw 
from this sense of duty. We are compelled to 
infer from it in the first place that the being 
who has a conviction of obligation is not an 
automaton. When we use the word " ought," 
as we sometimes do, in connection with a ma- 
chine, we pnt a very different meaning into it : 
with so much coal a boiler ought to generate 
so much steam, and the locomotive or steam- 
ship with that amount of steam "ought" to 
make so many miles an hour ; but we do not 
place the mechanical invention in the same 
category with the human being, of whom we 
say " he ought to tell the truth " ; " he ought 
to be honest." Neither can we place any ani- 
mal in that category ; for the animal, Nature 
decides what it will do,, and instinct is its only 
obligation. But we who feel that we ought 



DUTY. 79 

to follow one course of conduct rather than 
another — sometimes the disagreeable rather 
than the pleasurable — have in that feeling the 
most convincing evidence that Ave are neither 
machines nor brutes. Every man who has 
ever felt the sense of obligation has a right to 
say, " I am freeborn." Arguments may be so 
subtle and delusive as to bewilder him for a 
moment, or to half persuade him, possibly, that 
he must run in his little groove with scarcely 
more real liberty than the engine has upon its 
track ; but the moment the pressure of the ar- 
gument is removed the bent bow flies back, 
and he cries once more, either gladly or re- 
luctantly, " I am free." The Gospel, it is said, 
" teaches not only the monarch, the prince and 
the aristocrat, but the yeoman, to write ' I ' 
with a capital, and the letter is capitalized be- 
cause there is first a sense of self -capitaliza- 
tion." 

In spite of the relief that would occasionally 
be given to conscience by a denial of human 
freedom, life would be horrible, and insupport- 
able if such a denial were not false. No Ham- 
let would ever stop to put the question " to be, 
or not to be," but would at once make his 
quietus with a bare bodkin, or a revolver. 
But man is so free that he can never without 
his own consent become really a slave. Nero 



80 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

can bind Paul, but he cannot, by concentrat- 
ing all the power of Rome upon that one little 
old man, worn out with labor and hardships, 
make him choose evil. The tyrant might 
crush the apostle with chains, but his fetters 
cannot bind the royal will that is in captivity 
to Christ. We have each of us a castle that 
neither man nor devil can ever invade. There 
is no power in the universe that can compel us 
to change our " no " to " yes," or our " yes " to 
"no." 

At the very moment this feeling proclaims 
our freedom in one ear it proclaims our bond- 
age in the other. That sense of oughtness tells 
me that I am not a machine, and that my will 
can never be fettered by human chains, but it 
also tells me that there are invisible bands that 
bind me to the true and the good. " The lib- 
erty of a man is the liberty of a star, to swing 
to the pull of the eternal ordinance." I am 
free, as the lightning is free that flashes for a 
thousand miles true to the electric wire. I am 
under obligation to do as I ought to do as 
certainly as if this were the thing I had prom- 
ised to do. I cannot bribe this feeling to de- 
part and leave me to myself. The assurance 
of large profit by even a slight variation from 
what it demands is wholly without avail in 
bringing about any concession. The bribes 



DUTY. 81 

may bo increased ; millions of money and re- 
wards of every sort and quality known to 
men, whose business it is to corrupt their fel- 
lows, may be offered, but the " no " of duty is 
as clear and ringing as at the first. If I yield 
at last I must say " I will," I dare not say " I 
ought." 

That sense of obligation has not exhausted 
its ministry to my soul until it has whispered 
to me the unspeakable name of God. It tells 
me I am under obligation ; but to what ? It 
cannot be primarily or finally to the laws of 
the land in which I live ; for I might find my- 
self residing in a country whose laws would be 
in open conflict with my sense of duty. If the 
state should by legislation make theft per- 
missible, this sense of duty that had resisted 
all bribes would be quite as firm in resisting all 
unjust enactments. Neither can my obligation 
be wholly to my fellow men ; for remove me 
from them altogether, cast me on a desert 
island where there is no possibility of finding 
even a man Friday, and this sense of oughtness 
will not have left me. I should feel that there 
were many things I ought not, even under such 
circumstances, to do ; many thoughts I ought 
not to permit myself to think. My obligation 
must be to something higher than human laws 
or human beings : it must be to an eternal and 



82 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

unchangeable principle of goodness in the uni- 
verse, it must be to the good one, to God. 
Whoever beholds this burning bush in his own 
heart, this ever-glowing flame of duty should 
feel like Moses, that he is on holy ground, face 
to face with God. It will never be possible to 
breed a generation of atheists till all sense of 
obligation is eradicated. A free thinker said 
sometime ago, "No argument I have ever 
heard has proved to me the existence of a God, 
yet I believe in him." And he believed, as do 
other men of his ilk, because no argument 
could disprove to him the reality of duty. 

Yet in spite of this, men who are angered 
by the presence of unpleasant duties attack 
the Bible, as if it had given birth to all these 
obligations that fasten like parasites on the 
soul of man. They talk as if, to rid them- 
selves of this one book would be to rid them- 
selves of whole groups of duties, if not of the 
sense of obligation itself. The thief and the 
bandit might as well talk of getting rid of 
the law by burning law books. Books do not 
make laws ; they only record or explain laws 
that have been made. So this Bible does not 
create duties, it only records and explains du- 
ties that belong to us by very virtue of our 
manhood ; and when we strike at it to make 
life easier for ourselves, we are like a huntsman 



DUTY. 83 

in the forest who finds the sun hot and the 
hills steep as he follows his guide, and con- 
cludes at last that if he could kill this man 
who walks before him all his difficulties would 
be over. He fires the fatal shot, and says, " it 
will be easier now"; yes, easier for the jackals 
and the worms to feed upon the assassin, for 
the only heart that knew the way out has 
ceased to beat : so men who strike at this book 
and try to destroy it, should they succeed, 
would but slay their guide. Lighthouses may 
remind one unpleasantly of rocks, but sweep- 
ing away the lighthouses will not remove the 
rocks. Blot out this light and you will escape 
some unwelcome thoughts, but it will be at 
the cost of an eternal shipwreck. 

The church has just as little to do as the 
Bible in creating obligation. It cannot alter 
in any degree our relationship to truth and 
right. We do not free ourselves from obli- 
gation, in spite of any widespread opinion to 
the contrary, by remaining outside the church. 
Neither does a refusal to enter into her fellow- 
ship confer divine permission to live as we 
like. Some of the early Christians fell into 
this seductive and pleasing error. Constan- 
tine himself, it is said, refused to be bap- 
tized till he supposed himself on his deathbed. 
Baptism in his thought, and in the thoughts of 



84: FKIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH-. 

multitudes of that time, wrought in some way 
such a transformation in the eternal verities, 
that a few drops of water on the brow could 
make right and wrong change eyes and change 
places. This is one of the few heresies that 
have survived the ages of darkness and light 
alike. A very large proportion of those who 
believe in Christ, but do not confess him, are 
held back, just as Constantine was, by an un- 
reasonable hope that by refusing to do what 
they know they ought to do, they escape at 
least half the obligations that rest on other 
men. What they do in fact escape is the help 
to perform the duty that rests upon man as 
man, whether in or out of the church. 

The church is to the soul somewhat as a doctor 
is to the body. The physician has nothing to 
do with making health desirable or obligatory. 
If a unique plague should sweep all the doc- 
tors, Allopathic, Homoeopathic, Eclectic, from 
the face of the earth, Ave should stand just 
where we did before as far as our relation to 
health is concerned, only we would have lost 
the men who were able to tell us most about 
the preservation of health, and the avoidance 
of disease. A man who keeps away from doc- 
tors because they are more or less associated 
in his mind with hospitals, and bandages, and 
instruments, belongs to the same school of 



DUTY. 85 

philosophy as the man who keeps away from 
the church because ecclesiastical organizations 
are associated in his mind with prayer meet- 
ings and sacraments and sermons and psalms. 

All the great duties of life are the same for 
the man who is outside and for the man who 
is inside the church. Not because I am a 
member of the church, but because "J am 
fearfully and wonderfully made," David says, 
"I will praise thee." ~No life attains its true 
purpose that does not praise God; our hearts 
tell us that, and the Bible and the church are 
to help us in doing this thing that we know 
we ought to do. They are like crutches for 
the lame, that have nothing to do in making 
the man limp, but have a great deal to do in 
making movement of any sort possible. When 
we have answered the question how we think 
our professedly Christian neighbors ought to 
live, we have answered the question how we 
ought to live. It is a steep, rough path that 
is opened to us, a path that we cannot climb 
without assistance, and the Bible and the 
church say "let us help you." 

The moment our sense of obligation brings 
us face to face with God, we feel that it has 
two additional messages which it must deliver 
to our souls. One of these is of a promissory 
and the other of a threatening character. " We 



86 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

ought," and if we do as Ave ought we shall be 
rewarded : if we fail we shall be punished. 
Wherever we are able to use that word, we 
imply both these possibilities. A clerk ought 
to be industrious and honest, faithful and ac- 
curate ; if he is, he has a right to hope for pro- 
motion, or at least for the manifest approval 
of his employer. If he is not all this, he has 
an equal right to expect to be rebuked, and 
possibly discharged. And the employer him- 
self knows that he ought to be judicious in his 
expenditures and investments, quick to discern 
changes in the mercantile sky, accurate and 
reliable in all his statements, whether buying 
or selling, and then he feels that he has a right 
to expect financial prosperity and the esteem 
of his fellow men. Sometimes, it is true, he 
is disappointed ; he meets failure and obloquy 
when he expected success and appreciation, 
but his experience is acknowledgedly excep- 
tional, and does not shake his own confidence 
more than momentarily in the law that controls 
rewards and penalties. Merely as men, both 
employee and employer, feel that they have 
obligations wholly disconnected from business 
relations ; that if faithful, they must in the very 
nature of things be rewarded, and if unfaithful 
punished. 

These obligations touch them on eyerj side. 



DUTY. 87 

They have to do with every gift and faculty, 
with every talent, and with all types and de- 
grees of genius. Be faithful to your obliga- 
tions, to make the best of a mechanical, or 
musical, or literary talent, and there are re- 
wards that will certainly come to you ; be un- 
faithful, and there are penalties that will with 
equal certainty find you out. You must over- 
turn the universe and the whole nature of man 
before you can get such convictions as these 
out of the human brain. 

So much we may read out of our own hearts. 
But the Bible begins here where the epistle, 
written on these fleshy tablets, ends. It speaks 
of duty as if it were a bondage, necessary at 
first, but preparatory to something better. It 
calls law of every sort a " schoolmaster to lead 
us to Christ." It implies that the hope men 
have had of escaping from it was not altogether 
delusive, but they had mistaken the way of its 
possible fulfilment. They thought they might 
descend and prowl so low that obligation would 
sweep unnoticed above them, but this word of 
our God urges us to ascend so high that as 
there are mountains above all storms, so we 
may find there are heights of privilege around 
whose tops no clouds of duties ever float. 
There Paul passed the later years of his life, 
and there he says there is room for all the 



88 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

myriads of Christ's redeemed. "Ye are not 
under the law," he says, "but under grace." 
Ye have risen up through the clouds that 
hover perpetually over the earth, and only the 
sunlight falls upon you. 

Are we somewhat timid about ascending 
such heights as these ? Do we say, u Good old- 
fashioned duty is good enough for us. We 
will do what we ought to do, and because we 
ought ; we will never countenance these senti- 
mentalists who talk of replacing duty with 
something more attractive. It will lead to 
license in the end " ? Paul did not think so. 
" We are not under the law, but under grace." 
It is the love of Christ, not any sense of obli- 
gation, that constrains us. Was there any sus- 
picion of license in Paul's life? He warned 
all his brethren that the moment they made 
their Christian liberty an excuse for license, 
they would immediately find themselves in the 
grasp of the old law, as a man Avhen he de- 
scends from a mountain finds himself in the 
clouds he had left beneath him. 

There is a certain way we know we ought 
to live. If we try to conform our lives 
to this standard, we shall either chafe, and 
fret, and fail, and give it all up as an absurd 
impossibility, or we shall come humbly to him 
who has put within us this feeling from which 






DUTY. 89 

we cannot escape : and committing* ourselves 
to him, he will give us to Christ, to feel hence- 
forth only the constraints of his love. Try to 
be all that you ought to be, and because you 
ought, and you will be a hero and a slave. 
Try to be all that you ought to be, because 
you love Christ and long to be like him, and 
you will be a free man and a Christian. 



CHAPTEK VIII. 

SELF-INDULGENCE. 

11 And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods 
laid up for many years." — Luke 12 : 19. 

THIS man in the parable differs from many 
of the young men who walk our streets 
only in the fact that he was rich ; they expect 
to be. When their expectations are met; 
when they have in sight more than enough for 
every possible self-inclulgence for interminable 
years, their ambition will be satisfied. That 
is, they are lending all their efforts to be just 
the sort of a man that God calls a fool. 

It is not a very lofty object for a man to 
take as his chief end, but low as it is, a very 
great majority of those who have chosen it 
never reach it. The time of limitless self- 
indulgence never comes because of the count- 
less little self-indulgences by the way. Young 
men who are willing to work to get rich, so 
that they will not have to work any more, can- 
not get work, or getting it cannot keep it be- 
cause of their self-indulgence. No one would 
call them bad men ; they harm nobody, only 

90 



SELF-INDULGENCE. 91 

they are fond of a good many things that very 
few employers consider recommendations in a 
young man who is to be placed in a confiden- 
tial position. They are simply good fellows 
who thoroughly enjoy good fellowship. The 
one irresistible temptation for them is " a good 
time." They begrudge no sacrifice of money, 
or even of duty, for that. With a five-dollar 
bill in their pockets they feel as rich as kings. 
With two or three other good fellows they 
shut themselves in and all cares and serious 
thoughts out, and four or five hours are conse- 
crated to unalloyed enjoyment. Some of them 
can sing a song, some of them can tell a story, 
they can all drink, though none of them get 
intoxicated. " How could any one," they say, 
" except a bigoted Puritan, or a fanatical total 
abstainer reprobate anything so altogether 
harmless ? " " And if there is no harm in it, 
why need the head of the firm look so grieved 
just because we permit ourselves such innocent 
pleasures every now and then ? " 

Of course a young man who enjoys life and 
touches it at a good many points, will want to 
run away for a day or so early in the spring 
when every one has the spring fever, and trout 
are just beginning to bite ; and in the summer, 
either before or after the regular vacation, 
when the deep-sea fishing is good, a couple of 



92 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

days at the shore are almost necessary ; and in 
the autumn when the quail are whistling on 
the edge of the wood, and men with dogs and 
guns board the trains^ and the newspapers 
announce nearly every morning the big bags 
of birds that even moderately good sportsmen 
are filling — who, with any life in him at all, 
could help locking up the desk and taking the 
first train for the happy hunting ground ? 

Or you are a young man without much taste 
for out-door sports, but very devoted to good 
pictures and rare editions of old books, and 
gems of whose value most people are alto- 
gether ignorant. Your keen appreciation of 
these things, and the delight you take in them, 
you persuade yourself, gives you a right to 
them, though the pecuniary evidence of it may 
be unfortunately altogether deficient. You 
could have disbursed a large income in the 
most splendid and tasteful manner, and you 
sympathize too sincerely with yourself, and the 
discomfort such an effort would cause you, to 
make any persistent attempt to bring your ex- 
penditures within the very narrow limits of a 
salary which you feel to be absurdly small 
compared with your wants. You draw on the 
future for the needs of the present, but with 
each new draft the ring of creditors that has 
formed around you grows larger and more 



SELF-INDULGENCE. 93 

determined. At last a dim addressed to you, 
in care of your employer, is opened by him by 
mistake, and the secret is out — and so are you. 
The dream of that bright day when you were 
to be able to say, " Soul, thou hast much goods 
laid up for many years ; take thine ease, eat, 
drink, and be merry " is dissipated in one 
awful moment. Tour self-indulgence by the 
way has cheated you of the self-indulgence 
chosen as the goal. 

Or your make-up is quite of a different sort ; 
you do not greatly care to indulge your animal 
or aesthetic nature. JSTo one will ever catch 
you wasting time and money in eating or 
drinking, or on pictures or etchings and bric-a- 
brac, or for that matter on hospitals or churches, 
or, in fact, on anything else. You think too 
much of money for that ; but you like to in- 
dulge your ill nature, your malice, your envy, 
your bad moods. Striking inequalities of 
fortune, that have always attracted attention 
in every time and in every country, attract 
your indignation and wrath, not so much 
against God who has made the " unfair division," 
as you call it, as against those who are enjoying 
the benefit of it. You would not go so far as 
to say with the socialist that "property is 
always robbery," for you hope some day to 
join the robber class of property holders ; but 



94 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

all property now, when you have none, is a 
personal outrage upon yourself. .Neither do 
you draw the line at property. The possession 
by another of anything you would like for 
yourself is sufficient to open the sluice gates 
and set free a muddy current of censoriousness 
and hypercriticism. The poison of asps is 
under your tongue. The other clerks, nat- 
uralty enough, are afraid of you, and even 
your employer does not care to expose himself 
needlessly ; but at last in a moment of more 
than ordinary irritation you go too far, and 
are told that you may go altogether. You 
have postponed indefinitely, if not perma- 
nently, the hoped-for day when you would be 
in position to indulge your malevolent moods 
to } r our heart's content, by the premature self- 
indulgence which you have allowed yourself. 

How few who start out to reach the point 
where, like the rich man of the parable, they 
will be altogether independent and at liberty 
to indulge every whim of every kind, ever at- 
tain unto it ! The coveted honor of standing 
side by side with one whom God called a fool 
is denied them; denied them by themselves. 
They are self -defeated, — fools of another sort. 

Those who do reach that point by self-con- 
trol, or by birth, find that they soon defraud 
themselves of that for which they are most 



SELF-INDULGENCE. 95 

eager. They may have acquired the nec- 
essary means by frugality, as this man of the 
parable may have done, or by inheritance as 
the prodigal son did ; but only one of two or 
three possible conclusions of life awaits them. 
They may overeat themselves and die in a fit 
of indigestion; they may expose themselves 
when befuddled with wine and have a fatal 
attack of pneumonia, or a sudden chill carry- 
ing them away in the night, as may have been 
the case with this rich fool of whom Christ 
speaks. Or, escaping all these sudden catas- 
trophes that may possibly await the self-indul- 
gent, they may run through their fortunes like 
the prodigal, and be compelled to take up with 
the most menial occupations or starve. Either 
of these terminations is fatal to the hope of 
unrestrained and unlimited self-indulgence, the 
mainspring as well as the object of their lives. 
But it is easy to think of still another conclu- 
sion ; both life and fortune may continue, but 
the enjoyment of them may be exhausted. 
Byron must have been at that point when he 
wrote of himself : 

"My days are in the yellow leaf, 

The flowers, and fruits of love are gone; 
The worm, the canker, and the grief 
Are mine alone." 

The banquet of delights is still spread, the 



96 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

guest still comes eagerly to the table, but the 
capacity to receive pleasure is destroyed. It 
is a banquet of horrors to which no man would 
ever return but for the compulsion of a tyran- 
nical and insatiable appetite. There came a 
few years ago, from one of our great New 
England colleges, a handsome young fellow, 
an only son, the heir to an honored name, a 
high social position, and great wealth. What 
a life he has before him ! said those who knew 
him best ; but they little knew what a life 
there was before him by his own choice. It 
was not long before he was brought home one 
night intoxicated. His father suffered unut- 
terable agonies of grief and shame. He sent 
him, under the best guardianship it was possi- 
ble to secure, for the tour of the world ; but 
he came back having learned little except the 
taste of the different wines of the various coun- 
tries through which he had passed, and the pe- 
culiarities of headache following the excessive 
use of each. To-day he is a wreck, self-de- 
nuded of even the power of self-indulgence, 
with nothing before him but self-destruction 
or self-crucifixion of his base appetites. The 
crown prince of Austria, heir to the throne 
of the Hapsburgs, the double crown of Aus- 
tro-Hungary, the best educated prince in Eu- 
rope, it is said, with the certainty of becoming 



SELF-INDULGENCE. " 97 

before many years one of the greatest factors 
in controlling the government and civilization 
of the old world, let loose the beasts within 
him till the royal garden was turned into a 
feeding place for swine, and in loathing and 
satiety he cut short the life his self-indulgence 
had made impossible. 

" Short is the course of every lawless pleasure, 
Grief like a shade on all its footsteps waits, 
Scarce visible in joy's meridian heights, 
Bat downward, as its blaze declining speeds, 
The dwarfish shadow to a giant spreads." 

What lives have been crushed in the heart- 
less clutch of that colossal figure Milton saw! 
Go through the cemetery with one who has 
known the city well for two or three decades, 
and he will tell you the story perhaps of some 
of these lives. Just over there, under that tall 
shaft of finest marble, lies a young man ; see, 
"aged thirty-seven," the inscription reads. 
Just Byron's own age. What a man he was ! 
as beautiful as Byron himself. He had the 
physique of an athlete, a step as lithe as an 
Indian's, a voice as sweet as a flute and as 
strong as a trumpet. To listen to him was to 
agree with him. Men loved him as they do 
flowers and sunshine. His whole nature sloped 
to the south. He seemed incapable of an un- 



98 FKIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

generous thought, or an unkind act ; but he 
died in awful agony, worn out by dissipation, 
his doctor said to those who had a right to in- 
sist upon knowing the real cause of his death 
so skilfully hidden under the Latin nomencla- 
ture. 

Our own Emerson, calm to the verge of 
coldness in his criticism of life, has said that 
" punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens 
within the flowers of the pleasure that con- 
cealed it." It is true that all self-indulgent 
pleasure lovers do not use themselves up so 
rapidly; the fruit of punishment may ripen 
more or less slowly in the flower of the pleas- 
ure that concealed it. The hold that some of 
these men have on life excites every one's Avon- 
der but their own. Year after year they ap- 
pear on the streets of our great cities, and at 
the most popular watering places. Every- 
thing about them is Avell kept. There is no 
visible sign anywhere of decay. They are like 
the tall trees in every forest that stand erect 
and proud till some sudden gust brings them 
down, and the track of the worm made years 
ago, it may be, is revealed. Could you look 
into the hearts of these men even while they 
are breasting the storm, as you look into their 
faces, what you would read there would appal 
you. 



SELF-INDULGENCE. 99 

Our sympathy is always with the body. So 
long as physically there is nothing left to be 
desired, we are very slow in believing that 
there can be anything so radically wrong as to 
call for active measures of redress. If our eyes 
were but keen enough to pierce the surface, we 
should at once be confronted with marks of 
deterioration quite as distinct and even more 
complete than those that stamp themselves on 
the physical nature of the grossly self-indulgent 
man. lie has been on the down grade, this 
pleasure-loving man whose appearance is so 
fair, from the time he began to be self-indul- 
gent. At first he may have said to his soul, 
" Soul, thou hast rare treasures laid up for thee 
for many years ; thou hast one of the finest li- 
braries in the county, with alcoves devoted to 
science, history, poetry, and romance ; thou 
hast pictures, a gallery full of them not easily 
equalled, and thou hast music, inexhaustible 
stores of it, — now be as merry as suits thee." 
" What ? " " Not content with what thou hast 
at home ? " " Then we will travel, the new 
world first, then the old, Occident and Orient, 
Asia and Africa, not one famous capital or the 
ruin of one shall be left unvisited." " Still not 
satisfied ? " 

In Germany they call Goethe " the divine " 
because he was so human ; he understood man 



100 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

as perhaps no other German ever has, and he 
makes his Faust, philosopher and student, 
weary of intellectual delights sink at last into 
sensuality. It is the goal of all self-indulgence. 
The finer feelings are gradually undermined 
and destroyed. Conscience is seared with hot 
irons. There is no reason why one self-indul- 
gence should not be as permissible as another. 
Neither is there any reason for making pause 
because to gratify his desire the self-indulgent 
man must inflict injury upon some one else. 
After years of outrage visited upon his own 
soul, why should he hesitate ? he cannot be ex- 
pected to love others better than he loves him- 
self. He does not ; neither Faust, nor Byron, 
nor Burns, nor Rudolph of Austria wasted any 
moments in discussing the question. Nor do 
these men who drag* proud names through the 
mire of divorce courts. Their self-indulgence 
has long ago eaten away every title to nobil- 
ity, except that which is hereditary and in- 
alienable through the solecism of prolonging 
feudal barbarism into nineteenth century civ- 
ilization. 

Self-indulgence also eats away every title to 
heaven. If it can make a hell for itself, and 
for all it touches on earth, why should it not 
carry its potency with it into the skies ? If the 
self-indulgent could enter the place we call 



SELF-INDULGENCE. 101 

heaven, and dwell there, would it continue to 
be called heaven ? Heaven is a locality, but it 
is first of all a character ; it is holiness. The 
self-indulgent man, who has accustomed him- 
self to think that nothing can be too good for 
him, is to awaken at last to the reality that 
nothing that is really good on earth or any- 
where else, can be for him ; for he has indulged 
himself out of all possibility of either appreci- 
ating or appropriating it. 

What a self-destroyer is self-indulgence ? Its 
coarse hands crush every hope, both pure and 
base. How can God help calling the man a 
fool who deliberately plants his foot upon the 
path that he is forewarned will lead him di- 
rectly away from the object he seeks? He 
longs for Elysium, and the way of self-indul- 
gence leads to Tartarus. 

To talk to your soul of the ease and merri- 
ment to be found in sensuous delights is to play 
the fool. Speak to it of duty, of high princi- 
ple, and responsibility ; and to your appetites 
speak not in soft, yielding tones, but in the 
firm, ringing voice of command. " I keep un- 
der my body," says Paul, " and bring it into 
subjection." So have all they who have won 
the victories that thrill our hearts and quicken 
our pulses. Conquerors every one were they 
of self in some degree, whether their trophies 



102 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

were snatched from the field of mimic war, or 
from the blood-stained arena where real weap- 
ons were used. Every author, every scientist, 
every business and professional man, every 
[artist, every musician, who gains the croAvn 
toward which he has pressed stands a victor at 
last because obedient from the very first to the 
law of self-control. Yet the air we breathe is 
heavy with allurements to self-indulgence. 
We have every one of us felt almost ready to 
join the Lotus-eaters, as they stretched their 
pleading hands toward us crying, 

u Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind, 
Iu the hollow Lotus laud to live, and lie reclined 
Ou the hills, like gods together, careless of mankind." 

To swear that oath is to become, not gods, 
but brutes ; it is to drink in, not deep draughts 
of more abundant life, but the silent, subtle 
poison that rots the bones, and brain, and soul ; 
it is to dwell not in the hollow Lotus land, but 
in the valley of death surrounded b} 7 the moul- 
dering bodies of the strong and great, . over- 
come by mephitic and deadly gas. 

And the escape ! — there is but one — is up the 
cliff, steep, repelling, every step an effort, and 
a wound, while scoffs smite the ear, and the 
shadows of a great fear, Ave know not of what, 
is upon the heart. But as we climb, the air 



SELF-INDULGENCE. 103 

grows lighter and the jeers less distinct. We 
are no longer alone. Many who are both 
brave and true are climbing with us. We see 
now the face of One who walked by our side, 
even in the enchanted valley, but the air was 
too thick, and our hearts too full then for the 
recognition of such visions. Often the face 
was sad when we seemed on the point of mak- 
ing the awful surrender of the soul to self, but 
it is lighted noAV with the joy that fills all 
heaven because another immortal, for whom 
the great sacrifice was made, is being lifted up 
above the earth. 



CHAPTEE IX. 

AMUSEMENTS. 

" All things are lawful nnto me, but all things are not 
expedient; all things are lawful forme, but I will not be 
brought under the power of any." — 1 Corinthians 6 : 12. 

THEEE is nothing that looks so well and 
wears so ill as a general statement. The 
smoothness of it pleases the eye. The rotund- 
ity of it rests the ear. The simplicity of it so 
satisfies the mind that we are tempted to feel 
that if it isn't true, it ought to be. But it 
does not stand the test of time and use. It is 
one of St. Paul's highest clafrns to great com- 
mon sense as well as inspiration that he sedu- 
lously avoided statements of this sort. His ex- 
ample, unfortunately, has not been followed as 
it should have been, even by those who pro- 
fess to follow him as he followed Christ. The 
temptation to take the short cut has too 
often been irresistible. " Spare none : the 
Lord will know his own," is said to have been 
the cry with which the soldiers of the Spanish 
Inquisition rode down upon a village charged 
with harboring heretics. " Sweep them all to- 
gether under the same condemnation," is the 

104 



AMUSEMENTS. 105 

cry of the Puritan of the nineteenth century, as 
it was of the Puritan of the seventeenth, when 
asked to pass judgment upon the amusements 
and recreations in which the children of the 
world take their unsanctiiied delight. " Some 
of them possibly may be harmless ; but better 
that the innocent should perish with the guilty, 
than that any with the contaminating spot 
upon them should escape." 

The Puritan of the seventeenth century 
passed his sweeping and general sentence upon 
the sports and pastimes of his day, under great 
provocation. The Cavalier, made reckless by 
an enforced sojourn on the Continent with his 
exiled king, innoculated on his return with a 
deadly virus the life of the court and of the 
people, so far as was in his power, and took ap- 
parently a demoniac pleasure in it. An amuse- 
ment* without the flavor of wickedness was in- 
sipid to his corrupted taste, and he took good 
care that the desired flavor should not often 
be wanting. The Puritan, like most men 
fighting for life, had little time for discrimina- 
tion. When he saw that an amusement spread 
the plague spot wherever it was given welcome, 
it was hardly to be expected that he should 
distinguish between the native and acquired 
potencies of this dreaded enemy. When your 
home is being destroyed by an invader, it re- 



106 FKIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

quires an extraordinarily judicial mind to dis- 
tribute censure or indignation so fairly that 
the invader may receive the benefit even of 
such extenuating circumstances as insanit}^ or 
involuntary intoxication. When the Cavalier 
corrupts the celebration of Christmas into a 
pagan wassail, when he makes art and music 
panderers to lust, when he attempts with ec- 
clesiastical authority behind him to compel his 
Puritan neighbor to indulge in sports and 
games on the Lord's day, Avhen he dresses the 
one time innocent amusements of the people in 
a new and fantastic garb, which looks to the 
Puritan's eyes like the very livery of Satan ; 
is it any wonder that Praise-God-Barebones 
should draw his long sword and smite the new- 
comer hip and thigh ? 

We are Puritans in large part still. The 
blood of the Puritans flows in our veins. We 
come as fairly by any prejudice we may have 
against amusements as the young Indians of 
our reservations come to a feeling of suspicion 
toward the white race, that, as far as they 
know, is individually as well as collectively 
guilty of gigantic wrongs to their fathers ; 
and for us, as for them, the process of rejudg- 
ment, and of the readjustment of ideas, is 
necessarily slow. It may still seem to us, as 
to the young Indian, that it is simplest 



AMUSEMENTS. 107 

and safest to keep to our first opinion, and at- 
tempt no hazardous discrimination between 
real and apparent enemies : but the danger of 
this, for both the Indian and ourselves, is that 
possibly some member of the wigwam may by 
chance discover that at least one of the class 
under the ban is most friendly and harmless ; 
and then perhaps will come the generalization, 
quite as sweeping and quite as false as was 
made on the other side, that all the class to 
which this unobjectionable member belongs 
may be welcomed as unobjectionable. 

Whether or not young Indians are suffering 
much from the swinging of the pendulum to 
this extreme, I do not know, but that young 
Puritans are I think there can be no doubt. 
They have discovered that some once-forbid- 
den amusements are not inimical, but friendly 
even to the descendants of Praise-God-Bare- 
bones, and they stand ready to pry open the 
gate wide with a general statement, and let 
the troupe that was once barred out as a whole 
come in as a whole. This extreme confidence 
is in reality the logical, though it may at first 
appear to be the unnatural, child of extreme 
mistrust. It does little good for these chil- 
dren of the two extremes to reproach each 
other, however bitterly. It would be wiser 
for them to go together, if not hand in hand, 



108 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

yet as peaceably as possible, to an umpire on 
whose judgment they both rely. Why not 
take Paul? He should commend himself to 
both parties, among other reasons for his 
avoidance of the mistake of making such 
general statements as those into which they 
have both alike fallen. He has already arbi- 
trated on these very questions in his broad- 
minded, clear-eyed way. The young Chris- 
tians of Corinth had almost exactly the same 
difficulties, under a little different form, as the 
young Christians of Philadelphia or New York. 
They heard then, as you do now, extremists 
on the one hand assert that any participation 
in unbaptized festivities is a sin that may 
easily become, by a few repetitions, unpardon- 
able, and extremists on the other hand assert 
that a Christian is free to indulge in anything 
he likes ; and the more indulgence he allows 
himself the more complete evidence he gives 
of his freedom from prejudice and narrow- 
mindedness. 

" You are wrong," Paul says to the Puritan 
of Corinth, " in putting your ban on every- 
thing that is not distinctively Christian ; and 
you are wrong," Paul says to the Cavalier of 
Corinth, "in putting your stamp of approval 
on everything that is pleasurable, the less dis- 
tinctively Christian the better." " Can I go 



AMUSEMENTS. 109 

to a Pagan feast ? " says the young Puritan. 
"Certainly you can." "And to the great 
theatre on the hillside, and to the athletic 
games on the plain ? " " Yes, if there is noth- 
ing morally wrong at the feast, or the theatre, 
or in the games." The Christian is a free 
man. * He is at liberty to go anywhere and to 
do anything that his enlightened conscience 
does not condemn. " Then the Puritan is 
wrong, and I am right," says the Cavalier. 
"Nay, not so," says Paul. "The Christian is 
free to do all these things ; but if he is a true 
Christian he will be too free to do anything 
that for any reason may not be expedient, and 
possibly this will keep him from the feast, or 
the theatre, or the games." On account of 
that weak brother, who must have been as 
much of an offence to some of the Corinthians 
as he is to some of us, it may seem advisable 
not to go, for fear of setting him an example 
which he is not strong enough to follow with 
impunity ; and on his own account the young 
Christian may stay away for fear that he may 
get under the power of these excitements, and 
find after a little, that they have become a ne- 
cessity in his life, and so once more be in 
bondage more exacting and hopeless than that 
of the law. He is a slave again, and now of 
an altogether heartless master to whom he 



110 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

must give, under compulsion, his time, and 
strength, and money. 

The desire to be amused that lies behind all 
such questions as were then, and still are, 
asked, is perfectly legitimate. God has given 
it to the brutes as well as to man, but they, for 
the most part, are able to amuse themselves in 
quite unobjectionable ways. They are content 
to run and leap and play ; the gratification 
they take in such a discharge of superfluous 
energy is most evident. A lot of children, set 
free from school by the striking of the bell, 
amuse themselves in the same harmless, nat- 
ural, and rational manner. Their older broth- 
ers and sisters get a good deal of amusement 
of a similar sort in a similar way, but it is 
not sufficient. They cannot be satisfied like 
the philosopher who, when he wished to be 
amused, always "took a walk." They must 
take something more exciting, and Paul does 
not forbid them. He warns them of the risk 
they run, to which none of us can close our 
eyes, except with difficulty. 

This desire for amusement, natural as it is, 
is perhaps the most vulnerable point of attack 
in the character of nearly all young persons. 
In no -other way is it so easy to make slaves of 
young men and maidens who have every right 
to be free. A young man who was once at 



AMUSEMENTS. Ill 

liberty to spend his evenings at home, or at 
church, or wherever he chose, is approached 
along this open avenue and so enthralled that 
he must spend them now in some place of 
amusement under the direction of the new. 
master he serves. A young woman, whose 
heart was as light and whose life was as free 
as a bird's, is captured by the same device, and 
her master gives her no rest except as she 
wears herself out in his service. 

It is the most successful method ever de- 
vised for keeping the slave markets of pleasure 
well supplied. It is a method adapted with 
fiendish ingenuity to circumvent the most 
watchful guardian of the home, or the Sunday- 
school, or the church. Parents, and teachers, 
and pastors have seen their loved ones carried 
off by this monster, disguised as an angel of 
light, while they were powerless to clo any- 
thing but wring their hands and weep. We 
must face the facts, and they are appalling. 
Many of the pleasures the Puritans condemned 
are confessedly, judged by Paul's standard, 
harmless and permissible ; but the most inno- 
cent of them all, when looked at through 
Paul's eyes, is seen to possess the terrible 
power of transforming itself into a tyrant of 
the cruelest sort, when pressed too lovingly to 
the heart. 



112 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

Each of these pleasures, too, by a slight and 
almost imperceptible change, may become 
completely corrupt and corrupting. When de- 
sire is once aroused it is hopeless to expect 
that fine distinctions will give it pause, or de- 
cision. A tragedy of Shakespeare, or a 
comedy of Sheridan is replaced by a French 
drama that no decent man, much less a Chris- 
tian would read to his family, or to himself ; 
but the same man, professedly decent and 
Christian, will take a party of his friends to 
see the play if it happens to be given in a re- 
spectable theatre, buying his tickets without 
questions, and not thinking it worth while to 
return them and lose his money, though un- 
sought and startling revelations may be made 
to him. And at a matinee, the house will be 
filled with ladies, and for the most part young 
ladies, who know that they are in a particular 
theatre, but who did not know much, let us 
charitably hope, about the particular piece 
they are seeing there. The Trilogy of Wagner 
is superseded by an opera bouffe, and the great 
majority of the audience are pleased with the 
change. 

A game of chance and skill has its waning 
interest reinforced by the addition of counters 
that represent coin ; and they who have been 
playing continue to play with no keen appre- 



AMUSEMENTS. 113 

ciation of the altered condition, or are held in" 
their seats by fear of the smile which they 
know their rising would cause. The dance in 
the home, where all the partners are near rel- 
atives, widens into a public ball to which a 
bank note is the only invitation needed, and 
where vice and innocence in close embrace go 
circling round together, to the delight of the 
foolish and the grief of the wise. The young 
person who abstains totally, or who discrimi- 
nates carefully and conscientiously in amuse- 
ments, is the only one who can have any hope 
of escaping the yoke of slavery they are eager 
to put on every neck ; and for the slave dis- 
crimination is a forbidden indulgence. 

If you start to follow Paul, as we are all 
ready to do the moment we hear him say, "All 
things are lawful," let us be honest and follow 
him when we hear him say " but all things are 
not expedient." The man who is freed by the 
first half of this sentence, who is no longer 
tied up by unreasonable scruples, who has 
none of the acute angles of ignorance about 
him, and none of the sharp points of bigotry, 
attracts us strongly to himself. We feel that 
he is more of a man since he has ceased to be 
so much of a ceremonialist. But the man who 
is too free to care to use the liberty which he 
feels is his, to whom these things that are 



114 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

ordinarily appraised so highly have compara- 
tively little value because he knows of other 
things much nobler, and to him of much 
greater worth, is the man who draws us to 
himself most irresistibly. He has all that the 
other man has and more. He is as free from 
the law as the self-indulgent; but he is free 
also from the thraldom of appetite and desire 
which the self-indulgent are not. He has 
escaped from the iron bands of the Puritan, 
and from the silken fetters of the Cavalier. 
He has reached the point where he sees that 
for him all things are lawful, but he sees, 
with equal clearness, that not all things are 
for him, either expedient or necessarjr. 

The great value of amusements, according 
to the world that cries them up so persistently, 
is to pass the time pleasantly ; but this free 
man, about whom we are speaking, feels that 
he has too little time at his disposal to think 
much about getting rid of it in the pleasantest 
way. He prefers to use it for self -improve- 
ment. When he awoke to the sense of free- 
dom, he awoke at the same moment to the 
sense of his unfitness to meet the responsibili- 
ties of it, and now he has made a great dis- 
covery, so it seems to him, that some of his 
deficiencies can be remedied. " The time I 
used to give to the theatre," said such a young 



AMUSEMENTS. 115 

man, " I am going to give henceforth to good 
books." He is as free to go to the theatre now 
as he ever was, but he has something more im- 
portant and more interesting on hand. Or it 
is a young woman who finds herself enfran- 
chised, free to indulge every inclination as she 
likes. At first she is intoxicated with the 
novelty of it. " She will do nothing but en- 
joy herself for the next ten years ! " But she 
follows Paul, who has brought her out into 
this wide place, and on this high peak, to a 
still wider place and to a still higher peak, 
from which she sees that she is not only free 
to enjoy herself, but she is also free to improve 
herself, and to make herself a helpful force in 
the home, or in the church, or in society ; and 
this higher purpose frees her from the lower, 
with which, for a time, she was content. The 
young man or the young woman who sees that 
time embraces such possibilities as these, will 
not be over eager for an amusement with which 
to pass time away pleasantly. 

Another high commendation of amusements 
that is commonly advanced is that they help 
us to escape from ourselves, from our cares 
and burdens ; and they do, but we must come 
back again to the same old self and to the 
same old load. But we may find, if we wish, 
an escape from self still more complete in 



116 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

kindly activities, and in beneficent ministries, 
from which we return bringing with us the 
flavor of the sacred fields in which we have 
labored, a flavor whose sweetness is caught 
and held in character ; and so to return is not 
to find the old load unchanged, but lightened 
now, as Christ bears it with us, and if we only 
have faith enough, bears it for us. It is the 
same philosophy in either case : self is forgot- 
ten for a little in some engrossing pursuit, but 
it makes all the difference in the world whether 
we forget ourselves in a new gratification that 
may only make us more selfish, or in an act 
of kindly helpfulness, from which we emerge, 
bearing upon us " the marks of the Lord Jesus." 
We have all been irritated, I do not doubt, 
by the well-meaning advice of kind-hearted 
persons, who have said, " Be a Christian, and 
you won't want to be amused." Paul did not 
say that to the Corinthians. He didn't say it, 
for one reason, because it isn't true. That was 
the very thing under discussion. There were 
Christians at Corinth who did want to be 
amused. What Paul does say to them and to 
us is, that we may any of us be so Christian 
that we will want other things infinitely more. 
]STo sensible man would say to a friend of his 
who had just purchased a number of pictures 
at a high price, " You should become a painter 



AMUSEMENTS. 117 

yourself, and you would then care nothing for 
such daubs." They were made, these very 
daubs, by a painter who cared for them, and 
who, it may be, thought them very good. 
But he would say to his aesthetically uncultured 
friend, " You should become, by hard study of 
the best paintings and of the best criticisms 
upon them, a connoisseur, and then such works 
as these you have put on your walls will no 
longer attract, but will actually repel you." 
So Paul says to his young friends of Corinth, 
and to his young friends of America, for such 
you are constructively, " Be artists in the 
Christian life ; be satisfied, not with the rudi- 
ments of it, but press on till you attain high 
rank in it, and then you will not, you cannot, 
care over-much for amusements that in their 
coarser forms will be to you altogether repul- 
sive, and that even in their finer forms will be 
insipid." To the soul that hungers for " as- 
piration, hope and love," the theatre, and the 
card table, the dance, and the wine cup will be 
what stones are to those who hunger for bread. 



CHAPTER X. 

RECKEATION. 
"For this is for your health."— Acts 27: 34. 

IK his care for the bodies as well as for the souls 
of his companions in the miseries of ship- 
wreck, Paul imitates his Lord, who fed the 
multitude in the wilderness. The religion of 
Christ and his apostles is in marked contrast 
to every religion and philosophy that mal- 
treats and macerates the flesh. The human 
body has never had a fair chance. It has 
been deified on the one hand and detested on 
the other. The Greek worshipped it, and gave 
it all it asked for, as he would to a god. The 
ascetic feared and hated it, and struck at it 
timidly and spitefully, as he would at a de- 
mon. Each followed his logic, and logic was 
for each an eyeless guide that led into a ditch 
filled with mud, or into a bottomless abyss. 

These two antagonistic schools still have 
their representatives, as they have always had. 
There are men of the Greek spirit who say 
" amen " to one of the smaller American poets, 
as he sings "I adore myself." They glorify 

118 



RECREATION. 119 

the animal man, even his bestial appetites. 
There are, on the other hand, men of ths 
Puritan spirit who think of their bodies as the 
Orientals think of their wives — reluctantly, 
and with the feeling that the thought is con- 
taminating. They are insulted when your 
thought touches theirs and takes the form of 
a question about their physical condition. Be- 
tween these two logical extremes there is a 
vast mass of men and women who care noth- 
ing about either of these schools, but who are 
as unfair to the body as if they belonged to 
one or the other of them. Men of business or 
of a profession, women of society or of the 
home, who expect their bodies to respond 
promptly and cheerfully to every call of duty 
or pleasure, but who do not take them into 
consideration as objects requiring sympathetic 
and even scientific treatment. A very famous 
Englishman, Mr. Herbert Spencer, has delib- 
erately accused us of being the most wasteful 
people of- vitality on the face of the earth. 
We consume it, he says, in our overheated 
houses, we exhaust it in the feverish zest with 
which we pursue after business and profes- 
sional success. We have, it is true, a class of 
the very rich and the very poor, who do noth- 
ing at all, and a class between who work, not 
wisely, but too well, at least with too great 



120 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

an expenditure of energy ; but the class is la- 
mentably small that is composed only of those 
who work neither too little nor too much, never 
above or below their capacity. 

The remedy that is being widely and enthu- 
siastically urged for overwork is amusement. 
But amusement, as it is commonly understood, 
does not economize vitality ; it is rather a torch 
touching with fire the other end of the candle. 
When a man comes home from his work at six 
or seven o'clock in the evening as tired as you 
ordinarily are, it scarcely seems to be a correct 
diagnosis of his case to say that what he needs 
is to expend still more energy in making him- 
self as presentable as possible in order to emerge 
once more at eight or nine o'clock for an enter- 
tainment in which three or four hours are to be 
spent in hot, ill-ventilated rooms, across which 
many couples g}^rate to the sound of music, 
pausing only to cool the overheated blood with 
brief promenades in chilly halls, or on covered 
but un warmed piazzas, where iced liquids are 
quaffed and dyspeptic viands, called refresh- 
ments, are eaten. Such amusement taken fre- 
quently and continuously is as sure to kill as 
any other slow poison. 

Eecreation is something as totally different 
from amusement, as a mushroom is from a 
toadstool. They may look alike and taste 



RECREATION. 121 

alike, but the after affects are not the same. 
One is a poison and the other a food ; but 
there the leguminous analogy ends, and we 
leave it. All recreations are amusements, but 
not all amusements are recreations. The fun- 
damental difference is not that one is more in- 
teresting than the other, but that one is a 
builder and the other a destroyer. There is 
no impassable gulf' between them. On the 
other hand the constructive recreation may 
easily become a destructive amusement, and 
vice versa, as foods by a very slight change 
become poisons, and poisons by a change as 
slight become foods, or at least medicines. 
To take recreation is as much a duty for us 
all, as to take refreshment was for those 
friends and fellow travelers of Paul, on the 
creaking deck of the Alexandrian corn ship : 
"for this is for your health." Recreation is 
as essential as refreshment for a high condi- 
tion of health, if it is understood that the 
entire man intellectual and moral as well as 
physical is embraced in that term. 

The lack of time seems to place recrea- 
tion beyond the reach of the overworked, and 
to propose this as a remedy appears as practi- 
cal as to prescribe champagne for a pauper. 
But it is a truism that the busiest men are the 
ones who always have time enough to do what 



122 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

they see must be done ; and when a busy man 
understands that recreation is not only essen- 
tial, so many things are he is told, but that it 
is actually economical, it commends itself as of 
decidedly more value — if the claim can be sub- 
stantiated. That a summer vacation is an 
economy has come to be not only an impres- 
sion but a creed, and the creed has passed into 
a custom. A man will do more work, it is said, 
in eleven months, than he will in twelve. Em- 
ployers almost universally consider this unde- 
niable as far as they themselves are concerned ; 
and probably, if the time be lessened some- 
what, they believe it will hold good for their 
emplo} r ees. If it is not economical but ex- 
travagant in the long run to drive straight 
ahead at full speed for twelve months of the 
year, may it not be quite as unwise to keep 
that pace for all the working hours of every 
day for eleven-twelfths of the year ? 

Just as we call the man not economical but 
extravagant who borrows money at one hun- 
dred per cent., or at even ten or twelve, be- 
cause he sees distinctly an opening where capi- 
tal might at a fair rate of interest be profitably 
employed, so we must call a man by the same 
name who secures an hour or two by stealing 
from sleep, or a small fraction of an hour three 
times a day by bolting instead of eating his 



RECREATION. 123 

food, when for these fractions he will certainly 
be compelled to pay an exorbitant interest at 
some future time in whole weeks and months 
and, possibly, in whole decades of years. Time 
purchased at such a cost can never be remuner- 
atively invested. Neither is time secured at a 
profit, when taken from those allotments that 
should be devoted to exercise. Yery great 
men have been blind to this ; so it is not ex- 
traordinary that you should be. The most en- 
grossing topic of conversation between Na- 
poleon and his physician at St. Helena was this 
necessity for exercise as advocated by the doc- 
tor, and the excuse for not taking it as ad- 
vanced by the dethroned Emperor. The mon- 
arch of course had his way, just as stubborn 
ordinary mortals usually do, but the doctor, 
also of course had his vindication in the steadily 
increased debility of his royal patient, and in his 
untimely death. A man may think it beneath 
his dignity to submit to such common laws as 
control other men ; but the laws move as per- 
sistently forward as even unhoroscopecl planets 
will, and the force he had thought beneath his 
notice annihilates him, as insects are annihi- 
lated under the driving wheels of a locomotive. 
We cannot frighten nature with a frown, or 
beguile her with a promise. That you are go- 
ing to do Avhat you know }^ou ought, some 



124: FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

years hence, when you get time, will not retard 
for the space of a pulse's beat the stroke aimed 
at you the moment you broke the law and be- 
came a rebel. So long as you are in the flesh 
you must have exercise. The very best ex- 
cuse for not taking it will not be accepted as a 
substitute. 

You can get all the exercise you need very 
easily, it may be, by walking to and from your 
store or office, at least by choosing that mode 
of locomotion for what remains of the way 
after the railroad has swept you over some 
four or five miles of it ; or, if the business of 
your life lies under your own roof or not far 
from it, then it may require a greater, but by 
no means impossible effort. The two hours a 
day in the open air that are theoretically es- 
sential may be altogether beyond your reach, 
but a half hour probably is not. It may call 
for some planning, and possibly for some 
methodizing and systematizing, to secure it, but 
that will do no harm to your character, and 
the physical results will be worth working for. 
Here, if at no other point, lies the superiority 
of our English cousins across the sea. The art 
of walking has not there been lost by either 
sex. It may be due in part to a lower summer 
temperature and in part to a smaller develop- 
ment of vanity. The English pedestrian is 



RECREATION. 125 

not scorched and burned by an almost trop- 
ical sun, but there would be few pedestrians to 
find that out, if the Chinese custom of consid- 
ering feet altogether ornamental had prevailed 
as extensively there as it has here. 

But why talk about walking to those who 
are already wearied with the day's work ? 
Better talk to them about resting. "Walking 
may be the most complete rest for those who 
are tired with intellectual or manual work, or 
with anything except walking. I had always 
believed in this law, but never so felt it in my 
very bones as last summer, when, thoroughly 
tired with horseback riding for many hours, I 
got down and walked for a half mile or so, and 
was much more effectually rested than if I had 
sat quietly for that length of time under a tree 
thinking how tired I was. 

If walking grows so monotonous as to lose 
the character of a recreation, mount a horse or 
a bicycle, or tricycle and ride. Such a sugges- 
tion may seem to more than double the diffi- 
culties that make even walking appear an impos- 
sible recreation for you. Now it becomes 
a question not only of time, but of money. 
That cannot be gainsaid. "Whether you pay 
for your ride by the retail or wholesale, 
whether you own or hire an animal or a wheel, 
a good accountant can soon tell you how much 



126 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

each hour's recreation of that sort is costing 
you ; but the entire expense for the year may 
be less than that of one long illness, from 
which this exercise may save you. While I 
have a very high opinion of doctors, and rank 
their profession next to my own, I should yet 
rejoice if both they and we had very much 
less to do than we now have. I should be 
glad if physical and spiritual health might be 
so perfect as to make both our occupations un- 
necessary. 

The injury to your purse may not seem to 
you to be so serious a matter as the injury to 
your reputation. It would do you more harm 
with your employer or your client, or the gen- 
eral public to be seen regularly bowling along 
at five or six miles an hour on a horse or a bi- 
cycle, even after the day's work is done, than 
to be seen occasionally at the opera, or theatre, 
or at a baseball match ! Very probably, if it 
be evident that your mind is very much occu- 
pied with these recreations. If your emplo}^er 
hears you chirruping to an imaginary horse, or 
sees you trying experiments with an imaginary 
bicycle, when }^ou ought to be adding up col- 
umns of figures, or measuring off yards of 
goods, he will naturally and properly mark 
you down as worth less than he supposed. 
But, if, on the other hand, he finds that these 



RECREATION. 127 

things seem to invigorate you, and that the 
horse or bicycle appears to have made you 
rather 'steadier and more reliable than you 
were before, and has added to your endurance 
and efficiency, he will show himself short- 
sightedly selfish as well as selfishly short- 
sighted if he objects ; and the same is true of 
clients and the general public. 

If you have no taste for rapid movement 
accompanied by some expense and danger, 
there is the gymnasium at the Young Men's 
Christian Association, to which the objections 
made to walking and riding will scarcely ap- 
ply. The complicated equipments of such a 
room, impressing you at first as a compromise 
between a_ nursery and a torture chamber, will 
lose their ludicrousness in your eyes as you ex- 
perience the relation there is between dumb- 
bells and Indian clubs, and parallel bars, and 
the glow of health, and an indescribable, but 
none the less delightful sense of physical well- 
being. 

Recreation of a lighter sort, but of even more 
pleasing kind for very many, may be found in 
the lately popularized camera— scientific in- 
strument or plaything as you choose to look at 
it. It compels its devotees into the open air, 
and brings them into close and what ought to 
be sympathetic contact with nature. It gives 



128 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

them incidentally a good deal of information 
about gesthetic and chemical laws. Botany 
and geology offer a still larger field, that may 
be entered with even a smaller outlay. For a 
young person to have a natural or acquired 
taste for these or any similar science is to make 
the world for them an unspeakably more inter- 
esting place than it is for dull eyed mortals. 
There is always within sight enough that is 
interesting and beautiful, if we were not too 
blind to see it. 

I crossed, not long ago, the great causeway, 
hanging high in the air, that joins, as by a liv- 
ing nerve, the vast communities of New York 
and Brooklyn. The sun was just dropping 
into the ocean beyond the narrows, the bay 
was like a sea of molten gold, on which floated 
ships with gilded sails; the church spires of 
the two cities, and the tall towers of great 
commercial buildings seemed to rise in the soft 
light like living things, eager to escape from 
the earth. Through that scene of exquisite 
beauty we floated onward, as if our home was 
in the air — while men read their newspapers 
and women put their hands over their eyes to 
shield them from the sun, and the crowd saw 
no more than they would have seen if, instead 
of passing over this arm of the sea a hundred 
feet above the earth, we had shot through a 



EECKEATIOTS". 129 

tunnel as far beneath it. God is always bring- 
ing the purest pleasures of life very near to us, 
and we, unconsciously or wilfully, shut our- 
selves out from the enjoyment of them. We 
prefer gossipy little items about social gayeties, 
in which the chief actors have found much 
weariness and little pleasure; and instead of 
taking the finer and purer delights that are 
proffered us, we grumble that we have been 
denied those inferior gratifications that are 
altogether unsatisfactory. 

Art as well as nature offers in the study of 
it and the production of it, even if we are des- 
titute of the slightest touch of genius, an en- 
nobling and *edifying recreation. To appre- 
ciate a beautiful landscape transferred to can- 
vas, is next in value to a delighted apprecia- 
tion of the landscape itself. To reproduce the 
mental image of a scene or person with pencil 
or brush, may give the author of the sketch, a 
fine and refining pleasure, though a critical 
judgment might hesitate to classify the repro- 
duction among works of art. 

Literature is the stimulating wine of the 
mind. The pages of a good book may be a res- 
ervoir of inspiring thought and of purifying 
emotion. Humor may make us laugh, pathos 
may make us weep, poetry may make us soar, 
and all combined will recreate and strengthen. 



130 FKIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

Music is the great exorcist of ennui and dis- 
content and every demon. This " only lan- 
guage incapable of expressing anything im- 
pure " as Browning has so lovingly called it, 
is not a mere negative thing, a harmless play- 
thing for innocent youth, but it ranks among 
the greatest of recreative and moral forces. 
While less available here for the multitude 
than in Germany, it is not out of the reach, in 
some of its forms, of any who choose to make 
it either a profession or a recreation. 

Though we may not be accustomed to think 
of recreation as closely related to religion, the 
relation that actually exists between them is 
by no means distant. Health,* we acknowl- 
edge, is often dependent upon recreation, and 
in the term health Amiel thinks we include 
three-fourths of life. However zealous we 
may be, without health our usefulness will be 
terribly impaired, not only as workers, but as 
exemplars. Invalids who are religious will be 
accused by the world, often falsely, with being 
religious because they are invalids, and reli- 
gion is thus relegated to the same class as 
crutches and medicines and things of interest 
only to the lame and sick. Ill health not in- 
frequently has a disastrous effect upon charac- 
ter as well as upon influence. When we are 
sick we are apt to be sensitive, not to say irri- 



RECREATION. 131 

table. Hope is very sure to suffer, and faith 
and love do not often escape altogether. In- 
dulgences that might otherwise have been un- 
thought of are alluring to the man who is 
constantly made conscious of himself by a low 
condition of physical health ; they promise an 
easy and effective escape from himself. Se- 
duced by such promises, many a man has be- 
come intemperate and immoral. We owe it 
to ourselves, to God, and to our fellow men to 
make good, as far as is in our power, the wear 
and tear of life not only by food and sleep, but 
by recreation. 

After all, bodily exercise in whatever form 
can profit only for the little time. Even with 
the greatest care these bodies last only a few 
decades ; but there is a kind of exercise of the 
soul, godliness the apostle calls it, which is 
more profitable because, while it has great 
value in the life that now is, it is the only 
value that can be carried over to the life that 
is to come. This godliness is the same sort of 
a reaching out after an ideal by the spiritual 
man, that marks all rational exercise and rec- 
reation in which the physical man strives after 
perfection. Without this we may be splendid 
animals but we cannot be men. Far deeper 
and more significant to us all must be this 
question of spiritual health than that of phys- 



132 FRIENDS AND FOES OF YOUTH. 

ical well-being. Whether or not we have suf- 
ficient vitality to resist the attacks of disease 
is a matter of interest concerning which no 
one can offer an authoritative opinion, but it is 
altogether less important than the question 
whether or not we have within us that life 
that can resist the attacks of death itself. 
To that question an infallible answer can be 
given: "Whosoever liveth and believeth in 
me," says the Christ that was dead and is alive 
again, " shall never die." 



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VOLUME II. 

No. 13 (April '98). FOUNDATION STONES. By Rev. John Hall, 
D.D. 

Each chapter uncovers a foundation stone, upon which the 
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No. 14 (May). EXCUSE ME. By William C. Stiles. 

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